Consulting

Six Sigma Networks is dedicated to supporting your entire product or service life cycle. Our focus is consulting for Internet service providers, telecommunications equipment vendors, and investors. We love startup organizations.

Business Planning

We have developed very detailed business models for BBN Planet, CERFnet, Pacific Bell Internet Services, the @Work division of @Home, and GeoNet Communications. Our analysis includes estimates of all costs including out-sourcing analysis, rate-of-return and breakeven analysis, and capital equipment cost and depreciation. We have created both simple and very complex spreadsheet models and are experienced in assisting controllers and CFOs in generating models that suit their specific requirements.

We have developed a fixed wireless Internet access startup business plan, including base station siting requirements and topology analysis.

We have first-hand experience presenting dog & pony shows for VCs up and down Sand Hill Road and elsewhere. We understand how VCs evaluate proposals.

We have in-depth experience in building and running operations and network engineering departments, so we can build very detailed service organization models for cost analysis of operations and network engineering departments.

Marketing

We have undertaken many competitive analyses for business planning and for detailed product and service requirements definitions. We have extensively studied the in-building DSL market for RC Networks and the distributed content delivery market for GeoNet. We have extensively studied the Internet services marketplace for many service providers, particularly the T1, DSL, and fixed wireless access markets.

We have undertaken detailed pricing analysis of the router equipment market and the DSL access concentrator and DSLAM markets. Some pricing analysis is straightforward and some pricing analysis is extremely difficult, depending on the market and whether pricing is published or private. Your mileage may vary widely and require extensive feedback from the sales force or it may simply require web site research. We give you "apples to apples" comparisons in the context of specific equipment or service architectures, so that you can be sure of knowing how your customers will calculate the cost of buying your product or service.

We do market segmentation and differentiation, allowing your product to be placed in as many niche markets as possible without over-developing the product functional specification.

We have done product and service requirements analysis for all our customers. Requirements analysis is very important to make sure that all critically important and checklist features are developed to meet customer requirements and to assure that Engineering doesn't waste time developing features that the market does not want or need.

In the later stages of the marketing project, we write technology white papers to explain the product or service's unique features to the technical staff of the customer and industry analysts.

And, of course, we can help you write the engineering requirements so that the Engineering Department can build the product you need. This is particularly important if any aspect of the engineering work is to be out-sourced. We have experience dealing with outsource engineering firms such as Wipro. Outsourcing requires precise and detailed documentation and, of course, in-house development benefits from excellent documentation of the market requirements in terms that the engineers can understand.

Engineering Consulting

The typical Six Sigma Networks customer has a very strong engineering department filled with eager and bright engineers, but a little short on practical business experience. We can help your engineers apply their brilliant talents in the most effective manner by working closely with Engineering and Marketing & Sales to assure that the product or service is produced with no surprises and no critical missing pieces.

Product Engineering

You might think that any junior engineer could handle the RFC research part of the Engineering development cycle and to a large part they can, but RFCs can be tricky and subtle. Just because something is written into one RFC doesn't mean it is a standard or should be implemented in your product or service. Some hard-won practical experience is very helpful in teasing the full meaning out of complicated chains of RFCs and creating a product or service specification that is truly compliant. We can quickly scan RFCs for any required functionality and have done so for specifications for NAT-based services and products, multi-casting support, voice-over-DSL, voice-over-IP, and many other requirements.

We have also researched DSL Forum, Frame Relay Forum, and ATM Forum specifications for product and service requirements related to broadband access network architectures, voice-over-DSL, and many other requirements.

Consider IP multi-casting, for example. The original IP multi-casting model was completed some time ago. The IETF model is very powerful and flexible, but IP multi-cast technology has not gotten a lot of traction in the market. One reason is the difficulty of implementing "any to any" IP multi-cast over ATM. However, if all that is required is a one-to-many broadcasting service model, then IP multi-casting using the new "source specific" IP multi-casting model is very practical and much simpler to implement than the original "any source" IP multi-casting model. If, for some reason, this new "source specific" multi-casting model were overlooked in your product specification research, your engineering department could spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing features that won't be used.

We write IETF-compliant IP specifications and feature support for product engineering requirements documents that give engineers all the information they need to completely specify their development efforts. We are adept at writing these document for out-sourced as well as in-house engineering departments. Out-sourced development often requires a greater reliance on the written documentation than in-house development.

Another critical area in defining product or service requirements is a good understanding of the overall environment or network architecture into which the product or service will be deployed. Without a very good understanding of the overall network architecture, features can be missed or unnecessary features can be implemented at considerable cost.

Consider IP functionality for a product that will be deployed by incumbent telcos in their ATM access networks. Most of these telcos follow the design requirements according to the DSL Forum access network architecture. This architecture specifies PPP over ATM. IP functionality is not as important as PPP functionality in this architecture. Better to implement PPP termination modules than to focus much effort on developing IP-forwarding or NAT routing modules, because IP-forwarding and routing capabilities are not likely to be used by customers following the DSL/telco architectural model. If this aspect of your product were overlooked by your engineering and marketing departments, your engineers could spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing features that won't be used and missing important features that are on many customer checklists.

Consider IP routing protocols as a third example. Many customers have RIP, OSPF, and BGP routing protocols on their checklists, because these protocols are standards, but they don't understand that they will never use them in practice. A certain amount of spin-doctoring is required to assure customers that static routing or RIP routing is sufficient to meet the checklist requirements without a full-blown, expensive, and useless OSPF or BGP implementation/porting effort.

Service Engineering

Six Sigma Networks has over a decade of experience inside Internet Service Providers like NEARnet, BBN Planet, CERFnet, Pacific Bell Internet Services, SBC, GTE, @Home, and GeoNet Communications. We can help you define your new service and roll it out.

If you plan on out-sourcing some of your network services, we can help you specify the requirements and select vendors who can meet your requirements.

We can help you select vendors for routers, switches and other networking equipment and we can design your network architecture for the most cost effective access network.

We can stage technology demonstrations and product validations in your labs to certify vendor equipment works in your network.

Consider an example from the early days of Internetworking over ATM. A client could not understand why Internet traffic would not properly transit its ATM switch. We analyzed the ATM switch and determined that it suffered from the ATM "small buffers" syndrome and could not be effectively used on the high-bandwidth, high-latency paths involved in this network architecture. We developed some relatively simple tests that the client added to its suite of equipment tests to verify that candidate switches did not suffer from this problem. In essence, the test measured the size of the ATM switch buffers with streams of test data. A new vendor was selected by the client and the new service was successfully deployed. The new vendor was surprised by the award and hired Six Sigma Networks to explain how they got the contract and to help them market their equipment to other service providers.

A client was considering an ATM access network for a major service roll-out. One reason they liked ATM was because of Inverse Multiplexing for ATM (IMA). However, when they found out what their favorite vendor wanted for their new T1 IMA boards, their business plan went up in smoke. They asked Six Sigma Networks to come up with a new architecture and new vendors for much less cost than their original plan. Six Sigma Networks designed an architecture based on multi-link PPP over multiple T1 circuits. The network supported two levels of priority queuing to allow voice-over-IP as well as Internet data. This quality of service was one of the main reasons that ATM had been selected for the first candidate architecture. The cost of the routers and access concentrators was a fraction of the cost of the established vendor's ATM equipment and routers. Six Sigma Networks organized multi-vendor inter-operability tests that verified that the voice and data worked well on the new access network architecture under realistic conditions. Since the multi-link PPP capability was a new feature of the selected vendor's equipment, there were some bugs to be worked out that would have rendered the equipment unusable. Because of the size of the opportunity and the detailed test plans that Six Sigma Networks developed and used to prove the source of the bugs, the vendor was eager to work out the bugs and improve their multi-link PPP functionality for this client. The service roll-out proceeded with only a slight delay in the schedule due to this last-minute snafu.

This is typical of our approach to solving your problems. Deficient technology, overpriced equipment, unconsidered factors, and unexpected bugs can cost you a lot of time AND money. We help you avoid these traps, saving you valuable development time and helping you avoid dead-ends.

Business Development

Once the product is ready for development, partnerships and affiliate programs must be created. The overall understanding of the architecture will inform us best what partners are critical to success and which affiliation programs will make the most sense to the market.

Once a partnership is in development, joint technical testing and inter-operability demonstrations will be required. We can help with the specification and test result analysis of these inter-operability tests.

Sales Technical Support

Once the product development is well underway, the sales staff must begin selling. Most startups have a handful of key or critical customers in mind from the beginning. These initial sales efforts require a lot of technical support for sales people who are new to the company or product line.

Many large customers have a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process that must be followed in large procurements. Many sales staff don't have the resources to write these RFP responses.

Every sales team needs a good sales presentation. We can help you develop a sales presentation for the initial high-profile customers as well as more mainstream clients.

From time to time, a sales person gets an opportunity to present to a new major customer. These presentations must be custom crafted to deal with the issues that this major customer brings to the table.

We can help you develop effective sales collateral and application notes as well as develop sales training presentations to help your sales staff understand the nuances of your product and how to sell it effectively.

We can also help you with trade show support, presentations, and inter-operability demos.

Due Diligence

Private investors need technical experts to examine prospective investments and going concerns require due diligence as part of the merger and acquisition process. Six Sigma Networks provides expert technology due diligence and operational analysis of going concerns in the Internet services and telecomm equipment markets.

Bottom Line

As you can see by now, Six Sigma Networks is unique in its focus on the entire product life cycle for Internet service providers and telecomm equipment vendors. We bring hard-won experience to all aspects of Business Planning, Engineering, Marketing, Business Development, and Sales support. Send us a note and let us show you what we can do for your next product line.