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Carrier Services
Enabling the Mission
Verizon Sets Foundation for Next-Gen Government Communications
by Sean Buckley
With more than thirty of years logged in the government communications
space, Jerry Edgerton, group president for Verizon Federal, has seen his
fare share of government communications transitions. Now that the merger of the legacy MCI and Verizon is completed,
Edgerton is confident that the combined operator is in an even stronger
position to win a seat on the GSA’s Networx communications contract
table. Edgerton recently sat down with Editor Sean Buckley to talk about
the opportunities he sees in the government communications sector.
Q. From your perspective, what are the hot buttons in the public sector
services arena?
A. What we have seen is a lot of effort to continue modernization
programs and, to a great degree, counting on outside help in terms of
the implementation of those programs. We see agencies at different
levels of progress. We see Social Security aggressively moving, and the
DOD attempting to build their own network. The modernization of their
base infrastructure is part of [the DOD’s] overall consolidation and
refocusing of their missions. If you take a look at that then business is
good.
We manage a portfolio of government contracts, which has been
enhanced by the combination of Verizon and MCI. What we as MCI bring
to the market is our legacy domestic and international enterprise
network services. Now we have complemented that with the Verizon
piece of what I call the edge of the network. Agencies are continuing to
build out their networks and they continue to ask for more managed
services. It’s not just trying to buy circuits, or connect Frame Relay, but
an overall managed service that you can make adds and changes to. The
balance now between what we do from a traditional contracting
perspective with Verizon Federal’s WITS (Washington Interagency
Telecommunications Services)-2001 contract, and that experience now
applied in the base modernization programs and overarching enterprise
capabilities, put us in a very strong position. We’re seeing some of the
benefits of that and some of the concerns in terms of the status of the
industry. You have seen the consolidations taking place. I think we’ve
probably done a better job of consolidating so far. That does not mean
that AT&T will not catch up but they took one more bite and hopefully
they won’t get heartburn. You still have some capacity issues as the
Asia Pac area comes on line. It’s a very vibrant marketplace. Then, you
have the network and then the edge of the network opportunities.
Q. What are the network edge opportunities?
A. We’re seeing significant deployment of IP-type of resources services
at the edge. There’s probably not a massive deployment, but a local
implementation of VoIP as part of a PBX replacement program. This is not
IP in its full glory as of yet. Certainly, not IPv6, which would be nice, but
it’s not mandatory yet. There are some questionable economic benefits
to make that transition now from an agency perspective, while they
have other priorities for their resources. We do run Ipv6 in our major
government networks via VBNS+, so we’re prepared to work with anyone
that’s ready to go on a full-scale implementation.
Q. How has the integration of MCI and Verizon affected the way you
approach the government communications sector?
A. Actually, I think we’re complementary in our fit. The cogs went
together well. There was a little of grinding noise, but not a lot. We have
in effect consolidated the government organization. In doing so we have
brought together the best of breed of both organizations. Verizon had
the WITS contract and we have that interface point at the local exchange level,
and the enterprise piece we have with a significant number of agencies.
Now, we’re in this whole period where we are looking at what the next
set of services are that the government would like to buy through the
Networx contract.
We have designed our network portfolio around the government’s needs,
and we’ll use that portfolio of services for our commercial space too.
Basically we are using the government’s requirements needs to drive
some design and changes that are important to our commercial roll out.
[Commercial customers] want ease of billing, ease of ordering, and we take
advantage of the basic complexities that exist in the provisioning of
services and make it simplified, so that’s been a major investment and
demonstrate it for the Networx opportunity.
Q. Ok, so let’s talk about GSA (General Service Administration)
Networx program. How important is it for Verizon Business to win a piece
of this groundbreaking contract?
A. If you look at the seriousness with which we approached [Networx],
we basically said: ‘let’s use this as our design criteria for commercial
services going forward and let’s make the investment. Although it’s a
specific contract, let’s make it applicable to our other service
components and use it as an enabler to change our portfolio of services
in the commercial space.’ Like most telecom companies, there are
evolutions of mergers, of systems, and periodically we need to do
something in a different manner.
We’re using Networx as the model to do that; we happen to view
Networx as a natural extension of the services we provide. We enjoy a
significant place [in the market] as the result of FTS (Federal
Telecommunications Services)-2001 contract. Our intent to make the
transition to Networx as seamless as possible, and hopefully the only
people that will see anything will be the contract administrators at GSA.
Our plan is to start to look at Networx-like services today and make sure
that there’s a simple way of getting from FTS-2001 to Networx.
Q. What will be the main challenges for Verizon Business in supporting
Networx?
A. It’s primarily more focused on billing system changes because
fundamentally you have to convert your existing set of services to the
new platform. You want to do that in a way that you don’t have to re-provision anything or redo anything from a customer facing perspective.
Hopefully the GSA sees it and the agencies do it on an administrative
basis.
Q. In addition to Networx, Verizon Business just won a seat as a prime
contractor on the Army’s IMOD (Infrastructure Modernization) contract.
Tell us about that and the state of military bases upgrading
infrastructure to IP.
A. As a result of the Base Realignment Program, which is taking place
throughout the US and in EMEA as we move from Germany into Eastern
Europe, the DOD is going through the upgrade of the base infrastructure.
The IMOD program and several other programs are designed to go into a
military base and upgrade it for network-centric warrior and warfare by
putting in fiber and putting IP switching capabilities. IMOD is an
opportunity to bid on that. We have already won a couple of significant
bases this year in which we are doing specific work relative to that base
infrastructure improvement. It’s critical as we are working to improve the
network edge, which we couple with our overall network infrastructure
from the point of view of enterprise or agency-wide networking.
Q. Do you see Verizon Business taking on more of a role as a supplier of
managed and professional services to this market segment? What’s driving
that evolution?
A. What we are attempting to do is use the network as a core or central
aspect of how an agency or department fulfills its mission. More and
more of the network becomes the center of that because you now
deliver services through some kind of network-based capability. What we
see taking place is a move to that and the management of routers and
servers. You have to do that on some kind of centralized and
coordinated basis with overlay of security. Ultimately, the network now
reaches into the LAN infrastructure on the desktop, the device
infrastructure, and into wireless devices. We see this concept of
managed services as being more than just managing whether a circuit is
up and running or whether there’s data flowing over that circuit. It
becomes more of a service offering as services are taking place at the
edge of the network.
As you get into VoIP at a remote location that starts looking more like an
application that needs to be managed in that you have to look at the
status level of the devices, and is everything working properly? The
actual delivery of VOIP becomes another aspect of managed services
from an overall perspective. We have some situations where we are
expanding our Super NOC capabilities to probe even deeper and provide
a different level of service. If you do this then you have to have some
additional capabilities of what I would call professional services. We do
professional services in the form of agencies that want to run their own
NOC, and we’ll staff that for them, if you get into the lifecycle
engineering side on what are the right network configurations, what are
the right value propositions for changing out, and continuing to improve
the overall performance of the network.
We believe the right blend is core network services and the ability to
work with the customers through not only traditional sales approaches,
but also through a complementary set of professional services to help
that customer improve their design and improve the delivery of their
services. It’s essential that we move in that direction because it moves
us away from the commoditization of strictly the network elements and
allows us to get into the delivery of the applications from a managed
perspective. [For example], the whole world of surveillance is a
significant opportunity and how you provide that as a
managed service. It goes on and on from sensors and surveillance and all
kinds of things as part of an overall service offering that turns out to be
network-centric and can be offered as a managed service. The sky’s the
limit.
The other side is that we went through a little bit of uncertainty last
year, and we turned that situation around by the blending of the
organizations and the credibility that Verizon brings to us as legacy MCI
in terms of stability, financial strength, and the can-do attitude and
enterprise networking aspect that MCI brought to the whole process.
Q. No government contractor can go it alone these days. How important
is it to have professional integrator relationships to target new and
existing opportunities?
A. That’s an area that’s in transition. At one time, systems integrators
targeted telecom services as an area of opportunity. In many situations
it turns out to be a lot more complex, and a lot more difficult to deliver
those capabilities. We have seen sort of a retrenchment from the
systems integrators, and more of a willingness rather than to lead with
telecommunications, but to partner with telecommunications providers.
Our strategy is to become the partner with the systems integrator and
look to us as to what we can bring to complement the application set
vs. what we can do to bring the lowest cost of circuits. It’s very difficult
for a systems integrator to set up a NOC that has all of the logical and
physical security concerns. We bring specialty to that process that
makes us look more like a partner. I happen to have responsibility to
manage the relationships with systems integrators, and that’s the model
we’re embracing at this time. It seems to be working.
One of the things we are doing as part of Networx and also as part of
our commitment to the government, we have consolidated our NOCs into
a single location in Ashburn, Va. We have designed that facility as part
of our roll out. This is not only part of a real estate play, but it’s
important to get some of the critical resources to work in conjunction
with our principal NOC for our global services.
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