A Higher Calling

I had the good fortune this year to work with a customer of Telcordia, a triple-play service provider located in the Caribbean islands, who impressed me greatly with their pervasive strategic goal to provide the citizens of their country with communications infrastructure that would help drive economic growth and prosperity.

The executives I met didn’t talk about dumb pipe or smart pipe (I’m growing weary of that conversation), or the customer experience for the sake of delivering “a customer experience.”  They were focused on an ambitious path to deploy a powerful set of broadband and enterprise data services, in as fast and as efficient a manner as possible.  Delivering what they promised and when they promised was more than a corporate goal on a shelf somewhere; it was about … providing … communications. When we use the phrase “communications service provider” today, we often string the words together without much thought, or we just hide them in the acronym CSP.  Not these folks.  “Provider” meant something.

Adan Pope is the chief strategy officer for Telcordia, a global leader in the development of fixed, mobile and broadband communications software and services. He also serves as CTO for their OSS and service delivery businesses.