As the former service business of Marconi, telent began life in 2006 with a rich technology heritage. Here's the story behind one of the largest engineering field forces of its kind in the UK.

Every time you use the London Underground, drive down one of the UK's motorways or even pick up the telephone, there's a good chance that telent has helped along the way. The core capabilities of the telent business were developed through many years as Marconi Services, prior to the acquisition of the product businesses by Ericsson in 2006. telent's immediate stand-out as a technology independent service provider dates back to its engineering background and heritage as a major technology vendor, supported by a capability in voice, data, and communication systems. Around 1,500 of the 2,500 staff telent employs are engaged in on-site services, making one of the largest, dedicated engineering field forces of its kind in the UK.

Large-scale technology services in the UK telecommunication sector is at the heart of telent. "We have a proven track record in the delivery of voice and data services in the UK, with over 40 years experience in the design, supply, implementation and support of communication systems and networks across a number of countries and market sectors," commented Maurice Lee, Business Development Director at telent. "We support our customers and the distribution channel in the key areas that matter - implementing and maintaining the products and technologies that enable their business to operate."

Where appropriate, telent takes a ‘network lifecycle' approach that works with its channel partners from design and implementation to network refresh, replacement services, operations and maintenance. "We have experience in the Enterprise marketplace provisioning maintenance services for a multitude of PABXs, together with multimedia call centre and data applications," added Lee. "Following on from maintenance we provide many UC solutions, working closely with best of breed manufacturers. We are also working with Ericsson's managed service organisation to provide a full FMC solution and hosted telephony solutions for the Enterprise market."

The Enterprise market is important to telent. The firm offers a white label service to SIs, resellers and VARs. "We intend to recruit resellers who have a local capability with a requirement from a national or European customer that the reseller cannot fulfill, or a reseller who doesn't have the capability to deliver the service themselves and needs an experienced third party supplier to assist," said Lee. "Our partnerships are exciting as we bring to the reseller other product options and opportunities that they would not be able to fulfil on their own."

telent provides full coverage across a range of products including Aastra, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, Samsung and Siemens, and as such offers customers and the channel an independent service delivery. "Tried and trusted mechanisms are in place to ensure that we and our partners operate as one entity," said Lee. "This helps us to exploit the synergies, assure effectiveness and enhance the clarity of interaction with the customer."

telent has decades of experience in supplying a broad range of network and communications services across a variety of industries - from telecoms and transport, to utilities and the emergency services. In the Enterprise space, its target market is to support any of the resellers throughout the UK who do not have their own specific capability.

"We target, through partners, local and central Government as we have the security clearances necessary to be involved in any project," said Lee. "Together with verticals such as rail, metro, traffic, vendors and operators from the fixed line and wireless space, as well as finance, education and health. Key growth areas are in multi-vendor networks, continuation of UC, FMC and hosted solutions moving now towards virtualisation. As many customers already have some form of virtualisation, voice is the next area."

For many, the future may still be precarious but telent continues to buck the trend with deals of major importance and significance to the company. For example, telent has been chosen by the second largest operator in the UK, as one of only two preferred suppliers for the provision of maintenance and engineering services within its enterprise voice services portfolio. Furthermore, telent has reached another milestone for its work with BSkyB on their LLU programme, which in its early stages helped BSkyB reach over 70 per cent of UK households with their broadband roll-out. During 2009 telent and Sky completed a record number of site deployments in one week while enabling the network with the technology to support voice calls as well as broadband services. These milestones bring telent's integration skills into play, and prove its ability to provide high volume communication services within short time-scales.

From point of manufacture through inventory management and installation, to spares and repairs management, telent has positioned itself to handle all logistics requirement, while providing full track and trace visibility of assets throughout the processes. "For network build programmes we can collect equipment from any worldwide location or take delivery on our partners' behalf," said Lee. "We will then manage the receipt, inventory, stage testing and despatch of materials to network sites, while fully optimising equipment flow through intermediate locations and third party suppliers as required."

For maintenance requirements, telent provides, optimises and distributes spares equipment in response to network fault events, with 365x24x7 availability. "Our Asset Management system can scale to grow with the network as product lines or versions are refreshed," added Lee. "We offer multiple delivery paths to field - courier, box or in-boot - meaning that engineer ‘off-bookings' will be greatly reduced. And of course we offer guaranteed service levels aligned with customer demands. Our vision is to provide and manage technology infrastructure and systems over their whole life-cycle. Our vision guides the way we operate our business today."