A Solutions Manager is an in-house telecommunications integrator tasked with providing corporate customers solutions assembled from diverse Telecom products in a timely fashion.
The design and build of solutions may involve external third-party developers and innovative pricing regimes.
Thus we either pro-actively recognise possible solutions, or have challenges brought to us by the Sales teams.
At this point I meet with the customer, usually at a technical, or technical
management level and begin a dialogue intended to elicit the detailed requirements.
This relationship may expand to cover other parts of the customers organisation,
IT, corporate services, and is sustained until, and
beyond, the completion of the project.
If the solution is popular, it will go through our PSD group to become, "Business as usual."
I've been involved in presentations to senior management, and have discussed strategy and solutions with many levels of the organisations I have dealt with.
Customer Profile:
Telecom is structured into two major divisions, Network (which operates and manages the network hardware and services) and Services which has the relationship with the customer.
Services is segmented into a Product and Services Development (PSD) group and three market segment groups, Corporate, General Business, and Consumer.
Corporate, has a number of groups, including Marketing, and within that group is Solutions, where I work.
Thus I work with Corporate customers, the top 500 companies within New Zealand measured by their annual billed revenue. My involvement has been predominantly with financial institutions, the health sector, and has included other general corporate customers.
Current Projects:
1. Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM)
We are installing a cross town service to link two mainframe sites using DWDM to provide remote disk mirroring, disaster recovery and eventually linking two mainframe CPU's in a sysplex arrangement.
I was responsible for co-ordinating our Network services group's supply of diverse fibre routes, and worked with our Commercial group to arrange appropriate financing for the DWDM equipment, the back-to-back contractual arrangements supporting our partnership with the DWDM equipment suppliers, and the service level agreement with the customer.
My responsibilities also included ensuring compliance with our "Unmanaged Bandwidth Policy" and confirming the equipment was appropriate for connection to our network.
The consolidation of costs and the preparation of a small business case to justify the pricing was also part of my contribution.
2. Metropolitan Area Ethernet Network Interconnection
I've architected an "Ethernet LAN Extension" service based on fibre optic transcievers (FOTs), fibre and Ethernet Switches located in our exchanges in the central business districts (CBDs) of New Zealands major cities.
This has been an extension of my LAN experiences as Network Manager, into the metropolitan area network (MAN). It's been made possible by advances in the geographical range Ethernet technology, particularly over fibre, and reductions in pricing for such equipment.
This service makes fast metropolitan LAN interconnect an affordable proposition, and has proved popular with our customers.
Again, there was a business model to prepare, and the structure and pricing of the service was developed by me, though approved elsewhere in the organisation.
3. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL)
Have been involved since the decision was taken to roll out ADSL in NZ by Telecom, mostly from a large corporate customer perspective, but also personally as a residential triallist.
I am currently working with a number of our corporate clients to investigate the applicability of this technology to connecting smaller branches and in the area of teleworking.
Heavily involved in the discussion regarding pricing and positioning of this service.
4. Secure Networking Services
I have been asked to lead a project to supply a health sector intranet proposal which involves beginning a private dedicated WAN IP network and migrating to an IPSEC secured service as the protocol and it's implementations become available.
In a similar vein, sector based value added networks (VANs), I have recently become involved in investigating options for a printing sector VAN.