Q & A
Q&A with Rev2 CTO Robert Cruickshank
Q – We’re talking to Robert Cruickshank, Chief Technology Officer at Rev2. Robert, you have had an accomplished career in the cable and telecommunications industries. Tell us how you got into these businesses… what interested you about the telco world?
A – My first job out of college was with AT&T Bell Laboratories. While there, I became fascinated with the new digital networks that could reach and extend signaling all the way to users in homes and offices. I began to see these networks were critical to improve efficiency of energy generation and use, to make buildings intelligent and make them work in concert with power generation. But to be wildly successful, the new networks would have to be incredibly fast, always on and highly reliable.
I realized that as we look into the next century, we’re going to have to be very careful with energy consumption. And the way we’ll do that is by having reliable networks – that can carry pricing information over the SmartGrid – from power plants out to subscribers.
Q – Among your notable achievements is that you led the development of the DOCSIS cable modem at Cable Television Laboratories, which became the world standard. Looking back, what was relevant about that experience?
A – It was such an exciting time. There was so much at stake and we were moving at light speed. It was a unique standards creation activity where the customers drove the agenda. We successfully created a new high performance communication network and we established multiple suppliers of interoperable silicon and customer premises equipment like modems, voice MTAs and TV set‐top boxes. And best of all we created a network that automatically calls for help when any equipment or any part of the network is in trouble.
Q – At Cablevision, you were hands on with enhancing service delivery technologies, and as VP of the Customer Service Operations Center you were responsible for communications among various teams. Tell us about your role there… what did you learn about the industry?
A – My role was looking across six different call centers that we ran, many of them 24 hours a day. We would look at the calls that were coming in from our subscribers to see if it was individual subscribers that were having trouble, let’s say, with a video not playing. Or was it a group of subscribers that were having trouble not getting certain channels. Or not having phone service.
What I learned which was really critical is that service providers, cable companies and others have an ever‐increasing amount of information that needs to be correlated and put into the hands of customer service representatives and network fix agents. During my tenure at Cablevision, I saw our ability to grab information about subscribers that were having difficulty grow and become voluminous. And it was growing so quickly that we needed to process it fast enough in order to help subscribers that were having issues –cespecially small pockets of outages.
Q – Robert, at Cablevision you were an early adopter of Rev2′s RiskView application. How did you learn about the application and how is it used at Cablevision?
A – Rev2’s Chief Executive Officer Lou Steinberg first shared the RiskView product concept with me about five years ago. Later, when the RiskView product was ready for action, Lou called on me. I immediately saw the value in processing tickets to find network issues that otherwise would be missed because they did not meet a set threshold criteria. Let me explain:
Any service provider confirms outages, generally, by subscribers calling to say there’s some sort of problem. Now an outage doesn’t have to be “No service at all.” It could be “I can’t make a telephone call to a certain area code” or “A certain television channel is not working” or “I’ve got some sort of static on my phone line” or “My Internet is slow.” And so there’s a whole continuum of issues that may arise from outages to impaired service, but the key here is that all service providers are very well equipped to handle outages and impairments that are significant. In other words, those that affect a lot of people. So if a fiber is cut and a thousand people are without service, all service providers are very well structured to find and triage and fix that problem as quickly as possible.
However, if it’s only a few people that are having trouble – let’s say six people on one block have lost service because a tree fell and tore a line down – that problem becomes very difficult to find and to fix quickly. For example, none of those six people may be at home watching TV, or they may be home but all be asleep. And so what I saw with Rev2 was an ability to very deeply and systemically look at all the outage and impairment tickets that that did not meet thresholds, but still could point us to the fact that there was something wrong with the network and that we should be doing something about it.
Q – As CTO of Rev2, what do you feel is the core value proposition of RiskView, particularly in the service provider industries?
A – So for service providers, it really is a systemic way to identify issues that would otherwise be missed. And this is done by compiling information from multiple databases. Any service provider has a database of people that have called in for some sort of network trouble. There is second database, let’s say, that is for maintenance activity that’s being performed on the network. Then there’s a third database that contains network telemetry information, which might advise of customer equipment that does not have a good connection – let’s say a faulty internet connection or a device is falling offline.
What we do at Rev2 is combine the information from all three databases and correlate it. So even though any problem that might show up in any one of the databases might not be big enough to pass a threshold, in aggregate when correlated together, you can see there clearly is a problem. And then we help the service provider take action to help their subscribers quickly. So that is the value – a systemic way to identify concentrations of risk that might otherwise be missed.
Q – Robert, going forward, what is your vision for the RiskView technology?
A – Well, we’ve already successfully extended far beyond Service Providers to include verticals in Financial, Government, Manufacturing, and Retail Distribution. Now, we’ve seen that there are risk concentrations that we can identify in the service provider space as we’ve discussed.
But we can also identify risk concentrations, for example, in Manufacturing and in Supply Chain. Really any business in which data exist that might shed light on underlying problems and help find needles of problems in a haystack. Where we see that a combination of risks is really too great to be allowed to continue, we help our customers do the correlations to find those risks that would otherwise not be correlated – and would not be addressed in a timely manner. So RiskView is not industry‐specific. And the sky’s the limit on where we can take it.
Q – Robert, thank you very much for your time.
A – Thank you.
For more information, please contact Rev2 at info
rev2
com.
Copyright © 2011, Rev2. All rights reserved. The RiskView® application is a registered trademark of Rev2. All other trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.
