AT&T Specialist Hired

When Telarus began dealing with AT&T, Qwest, and Verizon, we didn't know that those relationships would require anything more than including them in GeoQuote and watching the orders flow. After all, every other CLEC and reseller that we deal with is almost 'plug and play' with our business model and real-time quotes. It didn't take long before we were tripped up by our own bad assumptions. We soon learned that:

1) RBOCs don't have API's for commercial broadband pricing/availability. In fact, most of them are the compilation of many different smaller networks that were spun off of the AT&T circa 1985. These networks have different web sites, databases, etc. and are almost impossible to deliver in a comprehensive API. That rules out adding the RBOCs to GeoQuote and having our agents go right to proposal/paperwork in under 10 minutes.

2) RBOCs expect their partners to have substantial internal resources dedicated to the relationship. From the time we started we have assigned our sales managers the duty of managing carrier relationships. However, after a few dozen hours of trainings our guys quickly started to express concern about the RBOCs - stating it was a full-time job to become trained and well versed in their back offices, product sets, promotions, etc. since it was ALL manual lookups in their back offices.

As Telarus grew, the demand for RBOC services grew and we hired Lori O'Rourke, wife of President's Club Member Tim O'Rourke, to handle our AT&T and Qwest manual quote lookup requests. For two years Lori has done a fantastic job helping Telarus agents find the pricing, paperwork, and promotion codes they need to actively market RBOC service (except Verizon - see previous blog posting).

A few months ago, we got lucky. One of Lori's contacts at AT&T suggested we contact a woman by the name of Pam Simon - which we did. Pam comes from a long line of AT&T-related companies. In her own words:

"Pacific Telephone (part of the Bell system) was where I started. That company eventually became AT&T as it is today BUT I went down a different path. Pacific Telephone became Pacific Bell (Pacific Telesis) at divestiture, then SBC bought it and then bought the AT&T entity that was the AT&T Long Distance Company at divestiture, to become the "AT&T" it is today and almost come full circle. I never worked for any of those companies, but instead, at divestiture, chose the path to AT&T-IS (Information Systems), which was then the equipment/hardware/software arm that included Western Electric, Bell Labs and all the mad scientists with the Bell Labs patents. ATT-IS eventually spun off its various divisions and became Lucent Technologies, Ageis, Agere, Avaya, etc. I worked for Lucent Technologies (even though when I actually left, Lucent had sold the small-medium business division to another company called Expanets and I worked for them for a couple of months before taking my Lucent pension. That was clearly a contributing factor to my decision to leave). After Lucent, I worked for CompuWave a Lucent/Avaya Interconnect and while I was at CompuWave, I decided that I wanted to move away from hardware sales and focus back to my "roots"---dial tone and all the associated services. CompuWave needed someone to interface with (at that time) Pacific Bell and created a position for me. Pat Watkins (Telarus' previous AT&T Mgr) was the Pacific Bell Sales Manager for the Agent Channel (which included CompuWave), so she and I renewed our friendship from pre-divestiture days when we worked in the same Pacific Telephone office in Alhambra, CA.

I went to Corporate Telecomm after CompuWave had a massive "Happy New Year" layoff and an eventual spin-off of their Lucent/Avaya Division. Both companies are primarily equipment providers/Interconnects and their SBC/AT&T association as an Agent/now Solution Provider is an additional value-added service for their hardware clients. Yes, I guess I "headed up" their carrier division---I WAS their carrier division. I always ordered the dial-tone related services for my clients---it just made sense and was a complete package."

To say that I am personally very happy to have someone with Pam's experience both with AT&T and affiliated companies, but also working directly for VARs. She is already "up to speed" on Telarus processes and software, and our agents should feel an immediate impact.

I feel that Telarus is now in prime position to play in the RBOC sales space and we are looking forward to many great years with Pam Simon on our team!