Outsourcing the Back Office

Veteran telecom executive Robert Annunziata is placing his latest bet on making it easier for carriers to get service up and running for their customers.

Annunziata now chairs Coreon, a start-up flush with $200 million in venture capital funding garnered in two rounds of funding. The company is preparing to deliver back-office service provisioning, ordering and billing for local and long-distance carriers.

Such services will save carriers some big headaches and costs, enabling them to enter new markets rapidly or integrate newly acquired carriers into their existing operations, Coreon executives said.

The New York company has three competitive local telecom companies testing its services, two in the Midwest and one on the East Coast, company executives said. However, they declined to name those companies.

Annunziata founded and was the CEO of Teleport Communications Group. Later, he was an executive at AT&T and CEO of Global Crossing. He now also chairs Velocita, which is building a new fiber-optic network.

Annunziata said of Coreon: "The technology they are using fills a need that carriers must have — great back-office capability, the ability to turn up services and process orders."

Carriers can use Coreon temporarily to integrate another carrier that they acquire into their core systems, and Coreon might expand into the enterprise network management business, he said.

Carriers may have to spend as much as $25 million and work up to a year to set up their own operational support services when they enter a new market, said Stan George, Coreons CEO and one of its founders. "We have a functioning system that they pay for as they use," he said.