ETS at Year 2

Scott Harrison, RCDD
Alamon Chief Marketing Officer
ETS Operations Manager

When Telmon joined Alamon in the fall of 2020, they were the missing piece of the puzzle, in terms of the company’s service offerings. Telmon, eventually renamed Enterprise Technical Services (ETS), brought expertise serving enterprise customers to Alamon’s suite of services that already included Network, Wireless, Outside Plant, and Utility.

No one could have predicted that the integration of Telmon and Alamon would occur precisely as a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic was wreaking havoc on the world, and more specifically, forcing many enterprise customers to shut down their offices entirely.

After recently marking the 2nd year anniversary of ETS joining Alamon, Chief Marketing Officer / ETS Operations Manager Scott Harrison shares his thoughts on where ETS came from, and where it’s headed.

COVID-19

COVID-19 Here’s the really interesting piece to remember. When we went into the pandemic, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. We shut down the economy.

Now we’re two years into these weird times. We still have the same level of uncertainty, but it’s becoming more normal to us and we’re learning how to react to it.

Scott Harrison Quote - Adapting And that is driving opportunities for ETS. We’re figuring out how to operate in a completely different environment than we had, say, five years ago.

We’ve always been good at adapting, and the world is going to force us to refine that skill. The better we are at anticipating and adapting to the market, the more success we’re going to have.

A HISTORY OF ADAPTING

PBX and SIP When ETS came into existence, back when we were Telmon, we were installing legacy PBX tails, 1A2 Key systems, a type of phone system that was out there. They used these huge 25 pair cables and you had to have a butterfly tool to put an Amphenol connector on and plug into these PBXs. It was all this really big, cumbersome, labor-intensive stuff. But that’s where the technology was back then.

Fast forward, and now you’ve got VOiP, which didn’t last terribly long, all things considered. Because everybody started going to SIP Trunking, and after SIP it became, “hey, guess what, we can really converge the data and the voice systems into one circuit in one system.”

And now we’re in a situation where Liberty Mutual, just as an example, used to have 85,000 phone sets deployed out in the field. They now have maybe 1,200 phones deployed throughout the company right now. Because for the most part, they’re doing everything over a soft phone on their data circuit that resides on their PCs.

We helped them transition through all of that. You used to have a pretty big room to accommodate all the equipment they had. But they’ve consolidated all their closets and now it’s only a really small room with just a couple devices in it.

As these changes happened, we were refining out skill levels so that we’re doing more intrinsic stuff rather than just being the box movers. We went from carrying around all this heavy stuff, hauling it around and doing the manual connections to doing more soft touch stuff.

THE OSI MODEL

Scott Harrison Quote - Integration We’re climbing the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model. Maybe a little slower than I’d like. The future of Alamon, I think, resides in us becoming a true integration company, where we’re not just providing level zero and level one’s physical layer of services. Instead, we want to get to the point where we’re doing the architectural level stuff, where we’re helping people figure out what data they want to use, how they want to get it sent to them, what applications they’re using to process it, and ultimately figuring out what the outcome of that data is.

That’s the brass ring, but we’re years away from being able to do that. And so, your average company has to work their way up the stack. They’ve got to climb the ladder. We’ve got to do the same thing. But ETS is doing that. And frankly, I see Alamon doing that as well.

RECENT SUCCESS

ETS and Alamon fit well together

Veterans Administration - Electronic Health Records Modernization

We started going after Veterans Administration EHRM (Electronic Health Records Management) projects, which is a multi-billion dollar endeavor by the government. They are in the process of updating the EHRM system, but when they update it, they also have to update the physical infrastructure to support their efforts. And that’s where the opportunity is for ETS. We’ve been working on trying to land some of these projects, and they have a fairly long lead time. You know, it’s a lot of “dangle the carrot” stuff where GCs get these bid opportunities from the government and they’re trying to put together pricing – most of which is predicated on, “hey, who can do it cheapest?”

It’s a fairly cumbersome process where we submit a bid with pricing and details, and the GC goes back to the government with it. Then the government looks it over and says, “based on all that, we need to make refinements.”

Scott Harrison Quote - Synergy So, with all of that, it turns into about a two-year process just for us to land this thing. And it took a lot of time and effort on Charlie Greathouse’s part to get this to the point where we were awarded the work. And throughout that process, there were other GCs competing for the work. Ultimately, Talion Construction won the project and chose ETS.

And now, we’re at the point where we’re getting ready to launch the actual project.

This project is an example of how ETS brings a complementary piece to Alamon’s suite of services. Historically, Alamon has helped its customers build the cloud, but Alamon’s work has typically stopped outside of the building. As Telmon, we were always inside the building helping customers use the services that had been delivered to that building.

So this has been a great marriage from the standpoint of, “hey, we really fit together well because we’re very complimentary in terms of the services we offer.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Yes, we have a different accounting system. We differ in how we handle project management and how we engage labor. But sharing the best of what we do, and borrowing some of what Alamon does really well ideally makes us all better as a whole.

Becoming a part of another company and its culture in the middle of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, with historic supply chain disruptions and massive inflation certainly creates more than a few challenges. There have been some bumps and bruises along the way.

Telmon always required a certain amount of revenue with a certain percentage of gross margin profitability on our projects in order to be successful. And that turned out to be really tough for us to do in the middle of Covid-19, while also joining Alamon.

We’ve finally gotten through a lot of that, two years later. I’m not saying we’re out of the woods yet, but we’ve had a decent run recently and we’re building momentum. The ETS business model really does work and yields great results when we’re executing the way we should.

We still see ways we can be better, but that’s always the case. You’re always looking for opportunities to grow.