GCI Alaska Awards Cable Business to Comverse

Step by step, Comverse has supported the back office transformation of GCI in Alaska. With the inclusion of GCI’s cable business, it is now supporting all of the service provider’s business units.

Back in 2005, GCI was a company of silos supporting cable television service, local and long-distance voice services, broadband and wireless. Comverse stepped in to help kick-start the convergence of those silos and 40-plus support systems.

“We have about 26 cable and satellite customers around the globe, including some Liberty Global and News Corp. properties. So we are quite familiar with not only the billing needs but the customer care needs in this space,” said Alice Bartram, assistant vice president of ComverseONE Billing & Active Customer Management.

This week GCI began one of the final stages of that convergence by consolidating its cable business into Comverse’s Unified Billing and Customer Management systems. GCI already has converged its billing and customer care for its Internet, mobile and wireline services. Comverse made the strategic decision to focus its product line on enabling convergence.

Looking for More? Jim Dunlap, vice president of GCI, will be speaking at the upcoming B/OSS Conference & Expo. Join us for the one-hour education session, Full-Scale System Consolidation, on Wednesday, June 9 at 11:30 a.m.

“This enables marketing and business agility, as well as operational efficiencies. We are confident that the Comverse cable services platform will deliver the same high-quality results," said Jim Dunlap, GCI vice president for information technology.

Dunlap’s confidence comes not only from seeing Comverse’s other 26 customers in the cable space but also from the success of earlier convergence and consolidation projects with Comverse.

“The success of the first consolidation project and the benefits they gained from it gave Jim the confidence to say, ‘Lets put it all on,’” Bartram said.

It also helped to consult an ROI study done by Nucleus Research that Comverse released earlier this month. “We had a third party do an ROI study on their first consolidation project with us including proof points as to why our unified approach is so powerful,” Bartram said.

The study also included feedback from projects with other service providers. In one case, annual support costs were lowered from $11.2 million annually to $1.2 million by replacing existing separate systems for customer data management, data rating and billing with the single system, ComverseONE.

Nucleus Research identified seven key benefit areas, including lower software acquisition and support costs, lower integration efforts and risk and greater revenue per user.

The study showed another service provider that increased its average annual revenue per user by approximately 5 percent due to new capabilities for cross selling.

GCI is the largest telecommunications company in Alaska. The company’s cable plant, which provides voice, video, and broadband data services, passes 90 percent of Alaska households. Its terrestrial/subsea fiber optic network connects to Anchorage as well Fairbanks and Juneau/Southeast to the lower 48 states.

The company’s satellite network provides communications services to small towns and villages throughout rural Alaska. GCI is in the process of constructing Alaska’s first statewide mobile wireless network, which will link urban and rural Alaska for the first time.

“It was an important move for them to unify all their BSSs into one place. It finalizes a transition they have been going through for some time,” said Garrison Macri, senior vice president of Comverse North America. “And it is good for Comverse because it shows we are capable of handling everything from order to cash across multiple [technologies].”

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