In This Issue . . .       ( Click ò for Individual Page Access )

                                                                                                                                                                       

  What’s Going On?

      Hot ‘Lanta: Spring Conference Sets Stage for Success

      Welcome New Consultant Members

      Member Benefits Update

      The Membership Committee’s New Mentoring Program

  Making Business Sense

     Reality Check: Consultants and Procurement Processes

      Legal and Regulatory Update

      Practice Development Notes

By HENRY BAIRD

      Sun-Tzu asserts in The Art of Warfare that preparations for an engagement are far more difficult than the engagement itself.

      Talk about difficult, we work in an age where, within the past year, AT&T has acquired SBC and possibly BellSouth, and Verizon has acquired MCI. Among equipment makers, it now appears (political considerations aside) that Lucent   will be acquired by Alcatel,              in a $13.4 billion deal.

      Indeed, as China looms as a source of new competitive threats, legacy equipment and service sup-pliers are consolidating in response.    I think Sun-Tzu would be proud.

      In effect, we live in an age when organizations are joining into one IP global network. As a result, equip-ment and service suppliers in our industry realize that future revenue growth will depend upon new ideas.

      Consultants, are witnesses to these vendor consolidations, as well as to newly emerging relationships and interdependencies all along the supply chain. These rapid changes indicate clearly that the business models governing our marketplace are changing rapidly. In short, the era when suppliers focused resources on building brand loyalty by racking up as many simple, single-point sales as possible is ending, in favor of longer term relationship building – a trend that directly affects us.

      As telecom consultants, we have always had a profound influence on

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revenue spending. We will know more next month when the Brookside Group issues its newest annual consultant marketing study, but 2005 was, in many ways, a different sort of year for IT consultants.

      In 2005, more than ever, we tended to facilitate informed decision-making in environments

where suppliers were as interested in developing service-based relationships as they were in negotiating sales of hardware.

      Figure 1, above, depicts the typical procurement process and shows typical points of consultant involvement. As a rule, the earlier in the process we can become

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