Client Success Stories - Tellium, Inc.
| Tellium, Inc., announced
in April 1999 it's next-generation Aurora Optical Switch
at the SuperComm show in Atlanta, Georgia and on June
8 signed a multi-year $250 million agreement with Dynegy
for the delivery of the first intelligent optical switching
network. This success only came as a result of having
introduced QRPD
training, facilitated, and coaching in January of that
year. Ed Glassmeyer, founding general partner of the venture
capital firm Oak Investments, the leading financial partner
for the Tellium start-up, had the foresight to suggest
to the company that it bring in the QRPD
methodology and a qualified QRPD
consultant. |
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This well-funded start-up spun out of Bellcore as a joint
venture with SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)
and Ortel, two large players in optical communications. In
January of 1999, it boasted about 70 employees of them 40
engineers, many of them PhD's. Their CEO at the time, Mike
Hodges, called an "all hands" meeting to discuss
the 16 projects under three product umbrellas. "The number
of projects Tellium had undertaken was unusually high for
a startup," Hodges commented. With the help of the QRPD
consultant and the permission of the board he sharply focused
Tellium's efforts through a painful narrowing of projects
that proved critical to its survival.
Suffering from PhDitis, QRPD
helped a great group of smart engineers to "get real"
and make the Aurora product finally work, an hour before the
truck came to pick it up for the SuperComm show. Hodges said
that thanks to QRPD,
in the 60 days between when the course was taught and shipping
to the show the engineers caught on fire, after having spent
a couple years mired in technical difficulties prior to that.
Ed Glassmeyer called what happened on Aurora a miracle and
was thankful to QRPD
for helping to make it happen. What wasn't a miracle was that
Tellium, Inc. went public in September 2000, raising $213
million dollars.
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