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BCM One
came into the world
as Business Communications Man-
agement (BCM) in 1992, when the
divestiture of Ma Bell was less than
10 years along and an environment of
finger-pointing existed between local
exchange carriers, long-distance pro-
viders and hardware manufacturers
when it came to which was respon-
sible for keeping companies’ telecom
services up and running. BCM saw an
opportunity to act as an outsourced
telecom/NOC service for companies,
making its business on the process
of diagnosing issues and working with
stakeholders to get things fixed. It
also provided consulting on opening
new offices or putting in new phone
systems, along with move manage-
ment (including cable plant design,
pricing out replacement services and
project-managing the move in terms of
both telco services and hardware).
In all of this it adopted an
agency business model in which it
earned monthly recurring commis-
sion (MRC) rather than consulting
fees – a relatively new
approach at the time.
In 1996, the Telecom
Act kicked off the CLEC
era, prompting BCM to
start a second business,
McGraw Communica-
tions. It was 100 percent
switchless and special-
ized in providing overlay
management services on
top of the circuits.
“Our approach was
different than most in
that we went with a virtual
network operator (VNO)
model,” explained John
Cunningham, co-founder
of BCM One. “We provided
white-glove service to midmarket
businesses. We weren’t about just
cutting 20 percent off the Verizon bill.
Instead, we were competitively priced
and guaranteed you to be speaking to
a live person within three rings.”
In 2008 a third business op-
portunity emerged for the company,
after consumer goods giant Revlon
asked it to design an MPLS net-
work to replace its global disparate
wide area network.
“With the CLEC resources we had,
we were able to load the inventory
and build a front end so they could
have visibility,” Cunningham said.
B
CM One is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year,
having watched its “plan, design, deploy and manage”
approach to technology grow organically into a highly
agile organization that seems custom-made for the cloud era.
Evolving
toaDigital
Transformation
BCM One at 25
By
Tara
Seals
BCM One leadership, left to right: Jay Monaghan, COO;
Frank Ahearn, Founder, Co-CEO; John Cunningham,
Founder, Co-CEO
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January - February, 2017
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