Home work gets easier - TeleCommute Solutions - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, Oct, 1999 by Ripley Hotch

The plan for TCS was originally developed by Scott Yeager, best known for his work with MFS to create the original Internet peering sites. Yeager, who later went on to work with Enron--now a TCS network partner--wanted to work from his own home in Houston and found that it was impossible for him to access the home network remotely. From there, he set the company up. It eventually was sold to Charter Communications International (not the cable company), which later became PointCom.

Meanwhile, Schilling was working his way through several communications companies, one of which was bought by MFS. Schilling heard about the telecommuting company and wanted to be part of it but got sidetracked into other businesses, ending up in Atlanta working with a former colleague whose company had just merged with Charter. "After three months in there, I found out they had actually acquired this telecommuting solutions business," he says. He didn't think the business worked well with the others that were part of the parent company and suggested it be spun off. The board agreed, and, says Schilling, "I said, `Oh, by the way, I'll go do that.' We've been sort of rolling ever since."

Schilling, a workaholic since he was 13 and helping to put together vending machine trays for his father's Pepsi-Cola business, thinks that the current ferment in communications is a mixed blessing.

"From a communications manager's perspective, what seemed to be great, in terms of many more options, is confusing--how do I pull all this stuff together to get done what I have to get done? I think we are just the beginning of the future communications business that says, `Let's take these technologies and put them together to solve a business problem, and then let me bring them in an integrated fashion to the communications guy to do it.' I'm not trying to be a long-distance carrier, I don't want to be an Internet service provider; I want to be the telecommuting solution for them."

These "applications-focused communications companies" will be taking a different road from equipment vendors who hand you all the pieces. It is perhaps a natural process in other businesses--no one, for example, expects you to build your own car from the parts--but it is just beginning in communications.

It's why TCS has some difficulty in knowing what to call itself. "We started calling ourselves a telecommuting outsourcing provider, but it's only partially that," says Schilling. "It's a sort of insourcing. More recently, we've called ourselves a network service provider, but we're a lot more than that. We're not an application service provider, but we've got pieces of that. Solutions provider. Maybe that's the right term, but it's not a term that the industry's familiar with. In everything, from presenting to customers to presenting to investors, to the whole outside world, what do we call ourselves and how do we describe ourselves simply is difficult."

Whatever the company calls itself, Schilling believes it is early on in a technology "that's going to dramatically change the way the world works. Companies are going to learn to embrace this, and it's going to change the way their businesses are run."