Private Equity And Atlantic Consolidation
A lot of private equity money has been funneled into telecom infrastructure investments. My impression is that returns have been poor largely because the funds don't really understand the challenges in making wholesale operators successful. The key ingredient is not technology. That is available to all. Anyone who has the money can have Ciena's latest version of Wave Logic. It is the ability of management to run a nimble, lean operation that leads to success and very few high profile telecom managers understand that point. Sales cycles must be short and provisioning even shorter. Most managers chosen to run new projects come from staid, often incumbent telecommunication service providers that try to solve problems by throwing bodies at them. They are highly risk averse so they throw sand in the cogs by allowing lawyers to dictate the pace at which everything moves. I have seen customer NDAs with four pages devoted to data processing alone. And NDAs don't prevent customers f
