Lucent fell on grenade after Ebbers pulled pin

By David Rohde
Network World, 09/06/99

Lucent has been twisting itself into knots to make sure reporters understand that it is taking responsibility for the "software-related issue" that led to MCI WorldCom's recent frame relay mess. But because the same software release has been successfully installed in other frame relay networks, you have to wonder why Lucent is rending its garments over a problem that has yet to be fully explained.

Maybe it has to do with the history of two companies - Lucent and MCI WorldCom - that were built by acquisition. After all, Lucent doesn't pay huge sums of cash and stock just to get some technology and fill in market niches. A lot of the company's actions also have to do with account control.

Lucent is famously powerful in terms of selling big switches to service providers around the world. But until very recently it had two giant gaps in its list of top accounts: MCI WorldCom and Sprint. Remember, until 1996 Lucent was part of AT&T. And Sprint and the original MCI long ago became principally Nortel Networks shops for their core telephony switches, partly because they were never going to buy gear from archrival AT&T.

What's more, when the fast-packet data communications market got going about a decade ago, AT&T/Lucent passed on the opportunity, instead picking patent fights with datacom manufacturers to make up for its lack of foresight. That left the field open for frame relay and ATM switching pioneers such as Stratacom and Cascade, which eventually sold out to Cisco and Ascend, respectively.

That move allowed two more name-brand companies to muscle into not only MCI and Sprint but also the original WorldCom. Ascend gear was always a favorite with WorldCom's Internet unit, UUNET, and the Cascade switches were a key part of WorldCom's frame relay network. And when WorldCom executives took the reins in the merger with MCI, they clearly favored their platforms as the core of their unified global nets going forward.

Now you can probably see why Lucent hired former MCI Chief Information Officer Lance Boxer to head its service provider software unit and then paid $20 billion for Ascend. Yet barely six weeks after the acquisition closed, Lucent's new favorite customer, MCI WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, was on the phone blaming Lucent for a 10-day foul-up in the network due to be the merged frame relay platform of the future. Then he fanned the flames by wondering if the multiple merger path - Cascade to Ascend to Lucent - meant that too much engineering talent had been lost.

Lucent is playing along, but Ebbers is wrong if he assumes he can push off this problem on a compliant and vulnerable vendor. MCI WorldCom has more problems than just this incident, which is why every customer discussion of network outages ends up moving to billing and customer-service headaches, as well. The ball is still in MCI WorldCom's court to give an explanation to why it let such a problem fester for so long - and what it says about a company that itself is suffering a merger-related talent exodus.