Joe Frost: JacobsRimell directs traffic at Comcast

Comcast adds around 11,000 VoIP subscribers per day.

“That translates into 20 million to 30 million physical transactions per day,” from sign-up to activation, said Joe Frost vice president of marketing and strategic alliances (picture right) for JacobsRimmel, the London firm that provides back office operational support systems for the Philadelphia cable company.

“Any new customer, or one who changes services… that all goes through our software,” Frost said.

JacobsRimmel--JR for short--was started 10 years ago by David Jacobs and Phil Rimell, network engineers who’d worked together at Reuters.

JR initially targeted telcos, which were developing new services to overlay on their existing networks. As the two engineers witnessed the media market splinter into various platforms, they figured the demand for systems management would grow.

“Only differentiation is the user,” Frost said. “Our approach was, ‘you need to focus on the user experience.’” Continued …

USER PERSPECTIVE
… Traditionally, Frost said, there was a wire, a vendor and a service--plain and simple. Now, there are a variety of multimedia services on any number of network architectures.

“When user logs into that on a different computer with a slower link, the game they’re playing doesn’t know that,” he said. “It logs in at the same speed because the whole service is implemented in an architectural way,” as if the modem and data rate are always the same.

“The operator should be able to understand the user’s context. They should be able to know what format content should be delivered in,” Frost said.

That’s where JR came in at Comcast. The cable operator wanted to develop new services from a consumer perspective rather than one focused on the network. It was JRs job to make those new services work properly on the network at hand. Frost called it “first-time right provisioning.”

“When a customer picks up a receiver, they’ve got dial tone,” he said.


PIECE OFFERING
JR logs annual revenues in the area of $25 million and employs 120 people full time. Comcast is the company’s largest customer. After that, it’s Denver-based Liberty Global’s UPC broadband service in Europe. UPC has 9.2 million video subs; 2.4 million broadband subs and 1.3 million VoIP customers, according to the company Web site.

JR’s platforms typically are customized, but the company started to offer certain elements as products over the last year, Frost said.

“Typically it takes a year to 18 months to launch a new service,” he said. “It’s all about getting the operational processes in place, if you think about what an operational platform has to do--take an order via e-mail, SMS, voice, etc… interpret it, decompose it, and say ‘this individual wants this product made of these services.’”

A service provider would normally select operational software that locked them into a single vendor. The product-based offering allows greater flexibility.

“If Comcast decides to change vendors on some levels, it’s up to JR to go to that new vendor,” Frost said.


FEATURE FALL-OUT
Going to a product-oriented offering doesn’t mean those products don’t have to evolve constantly. Every new feature on a communications device means another long string of operational transactions.

With SIP phones, for example, “the handset has far more features than we’re used to,” Frost said. “It has to be configured. You can’t just take it out of the box. Activation is a lot more complicated.”

A similar phenomena occurs with network technology.

“If you’re an operator and you buy a switch, you got an army of operators to support that switch,” Frost said. With a softswitch, “… you get a few directions on configuration.”

JR has created off-the-shelf software to activate that switch, and other offerings to configure the IP PBX systems being adopted by a lot of small businesses. Frost noted that an automated PBX could be had for $250, “but it takes a lot of configuring. Let’s say you’re going to deploy 1,000 of these. You don’t want an engineer sitting at his desk configuring these. It has to be automated.”