Archive for February, 2010
Viva Las Vegas
Feb 28th
Heading to Las Vegas for the 2010 Spring Channel Partner show. This show is great for networking, meeting consultants and agents across the country, and having fun.Â
Intelletrace relies on relationships, networking, and referrals to build our business. Intelletrace started as having a reputation as the “consultant’s consultant”. We work with consultants to resolve their customer’s problems and make it very easy for their customers to order new data and Internet services. Consultants love this, as we allow them to concentrate of the job their customer hired them for. The consultant does not have to worry about a Carrier providing a service which does not work properly.Â
Intelletrace also works with a select few of telecom agents. The reason we just do not work with any agent, Intelletrace wants to maintain a high quality reputation and a great service level for it’s agents.  Our agents can access our ON-NET building list at http://www.intelletrace.com/OnNet-Bulding-Search.html and all of our Agreements at http://www.intelletrace.com/Agreements.html for their customers to review easily.
When agents sign up with Intelletrace, they can be very confident in selling the Intelletrace solution to their customer. Agents will have access to our entire team, consisting of an Account Manager, Sales Engineer, and our Customer Service Department. Another great advantage Intelletrace provides their agents, is an unbiased opinion on which Carrier might be the best fit. Intelletrace is a neutral Carrier, with access to many networks and very competitive pricing for their Agents to get the deal done. The commission plan is also very flexible, where Agents can make all the way up to 20% residual.  Â
Looking forward to another great time in Vegas. Hope to see you there!
Advantages of Being a Neutral Carrier
Feb 23rd
Due to holidays and lots of snow in Lake Tahoe, I took a little break. I am back and busier than ever. Companies still need lots of bandwidth to handle their growing networks. Here is one story on why being a neutral Carrier and having access to many different fiber networks, has many advantages. Â
Recently Intelletrace provided a 200 meg point to point from Sacramento to Oakland. Near the end of the installation process, the Carrier Intelletrace chose, ran into problems of building out their fiber network to Sacramento. Our customer had deadlines. Intelletrace acted quickly to search out another Carrier who had capacity to meet our deadlines. We found Time Warner Telecom…  Time Warner Telecom recently have begun to build out their network in the Sacramento area over the last year and had plenty of capacity to fit our needs. However, we had deadlines. We were a little concerned if Time Warner Telecom could meet our deadlines. We needed to be turned up in 15 days. Most Carriers take 45 to 60 days to turn up a circuit of this size, even when they have capacity. Time Warner Telecom turned up and was ready to go within our deadlines.
I should also mention Time Warner Telecom also came through for us during the Thanksgiving holiday. This time it was a 5 day deadline. Time Warner Telecom came through with flying colors. Although, the Time Warner Telecom footprint is limited, I believe they have a very good niche in the marketplace. I look forward to doing more business with them.
Crush It!
Feb 10th
I just read a great book on building your brand on the web. “Crush It” by Gary Vanderchuk, holds nothing back. He tells his story on how he has built a multi-million dollar brand through determination, creativity, and long term goals. I highly suggest reading it, if you are interested in having an on-line presence and want to start building your own brand. Gary gives suggestions on where to start and step by step on what to do everynight to reach your goals. As long as your following your passion, you cannot fail.  Although, I am starting to enjoy blogging and expressing my opinions, especially after a very frustrating day in telecom, it sometimes can be tough to get the energy to start working at night after a long day. The next book I am reading is “The Six Pixels of Separation”. Another book on the power of the web, networking, blogging, and reaching out to millions of people. I will keep everybody updated on how it is.
Is this the Information Age?
Feb 2nd
I would say we are very much in the Information Age. With the power of the Internet, we are able to grab information almost seconds after an event has happened. When Northern California was hit with a powerful thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago, I woke up at 3am after I thought a bomb must of been dropped in my backyard. I quickly went downstairs, jumped on the Internet to find out what exactly had happened. Within minutes, I found out lightning had struck in Mill Valley (about 15 miles away from I live) and struck down a large tree.Â
If I can find out information about a thunderstorm within minutes, why in the world AT&T cannot provide customers circuit id’s, demarcation points, and expiration dates for their customers in a timely manner. I met with a client today, he has not once had met his sales engineer from AT&T and all of his technical questions are being answered by a sales person. Pretty scary, when you are relying on a sales person for technical info.  I am somewhat technical, but I would be the first to tell you I am not an engineer and will always bring in an Intelletrace engineer when customers want technical solutions. When it came it getting an audit on all of his circuits, it took almost a month for AT&T to provide this. Intelletrace has an online portal, where customer can gain instant access to all of their circuits, id’s, expiration terms, invoices, and trouble tickets.
This same client also has an Internet circuit with Qwest. After a 2 weeks, he is still waiting to get the information about his utilization. This information should be instant and not a mystery to their customers. How can customer manage their network and plan from growth if their Carrier cannot even give them information to assist them to plan? Intelletrace provides a portal so you can run reports on your bandwidth utilization real time.
I still find it hard to believe in the 21st century, businesses continue to fall behind and keep making the mistake that customers will continue to buy form them and keep coming back. Intelletrace recongnizes this and continues to work on making the customer experience simple and enjoyable. We now are utilizing the latest communication tools provided by social networking, online portals for managing bandwidth and tracking trouble tickets, and online fiber building lists.
We understand with PDAs and online tools, people are expecting information instantly. In the Information Age, they should!
Are You Following Yet?
Feb 1st
There was a major outage in Yuma, AZ today, lasting over six hours.  Many customers were affected, including several of Intelletrace’s. It was a Level3 fiber cut. We found out the hard way, Verizon Business was buying capacity from them, with no protect path. We also learned other Carriers were buying capacity from Level3. Unfortunately, Verizon Business was reselling a Level3 circuit, when we thought we were buying a complete Verizon Business circuit end to end. I will save for another blog. However, we did gain new followers including Verizon and Telepacific Support, on Twitter. We were giving real live updates with no fluff. For future outages, please follow us at @AskIntelletrace. Our support will tell it like it is and provide our customers real live updates of major outages. These outages might also affect you as well! Verizon Support would not give updates via Twitter regarding any updates. Verizon Support prefers our NOC to call into their Support and sit in a que for endless minutes. It seems like a waste of time and not a very useful way to communicate when a major outage occurs and multiple people are affected. Just think how many phone lines and use of resources would be available in major outages, when thousands of people can be reached in a tweet or a blog. We are communication companies and we need to continue to work on communicating more effectively with each other, especially with new applications being invented constantly.Â
Join our NOC or follow me @malciati and any product questions at @intelletrace on Twitter.
Marc Alciati
Age: 42
Gender: Male
Industry: Telecommunications
Occupation: President CEO
Location: Novato : CA : United States
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