QuickTake with Jack Cicon

Jack Cicon President and CEO, Integral Access

Jack Cicon, former vice president and general manager of Lucent Technologies‰ access business division, joined Integral Access in September as president and CEO. The company has focused on engineering, but now that product development is solidly under way, Cicon will concentrate on the company's operations. He recently discussed his role and his goals for the company with Susan Biagi.

How are you translating your previous experience to Integral Access?

Jeff Wake, the founder [and current chairman], and I make a great pair. He is the visionary, and I have a lot of experience in executing and getting product out the door. What I told the board of directors is that my strength—and what I'm looking for—is to get the team focused, to get [the product] to a general availability state and to add the necessary capacity to get it to the service provider marketplace.

What is your plan in that regard?

I've been working on how to structure the company for success, to get set up and develop the team right away. We need to build stronger systems for test capabilities, system service, customer support capabilities—without bringing the bureaucracy. I want to ramp up the revenues. [I look at] what it means to support the product because the customer is evaluating how well the product works, as well as how well we answer the phone and respond if there's a problem.

I set up a separate customer support organization and made the system test [process] more independent. We're building strong reliability into our manufacturing capabilities and a tighter link to the sales team and engineering organization.

What differentiates your access system from others?

Clearly we want to operate in the carrier-grade space and [offer] the quality and reliability [needed there]. What differentiates us is in two dimensions: We are focused on targeting next the generation network based on SoftSwitch technology, and we also have the capability to handle GR-303. The more important element is that we convert everything to a packet form, so we can handle all types of traffic and make efficient use of the bandwidth. The next generation network is packet-based. By using IP and MPLS, we have the ability to handle a variety of services with the QOS necessary.

One of the things I'm excited about and I've spent my whole life on is doing carrier-class products. So the charter we have in the company is to ensure that the PurePacketNode is a carrier-grade quality product that handles both voice quality and product reliability...and is really focused on meeting the demands of the CLEC/ILEC market and new service providers from a product point of view. We've also built as part of the product an OMS system, which is more than an element manager. It really lets us do service provisioning, setting up definitions of service right from our IADs in through the node. It can handle a set of management service, as well as the billing and traffic reporting.

How will you endure in a SoftSwitch market that has yet to shake out?

The SoftSwitch market is huge, and what will separate those that do from those that don‰t will be delivering on the promised. Those that get out first set the expectation level with a solid product [that] will make it to the finish line. Not everybody is going to survive. We're working with several SoftSwitch vendors to make sure our product can talk to more than one.