|
Local company says ‘Hola’ to Latin America
Mount Pleasant firm successfully fills telecommunication void left by AT&T
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
A short history of the global telecommunications company Telecom International begins with the dream of a man from Pennsylvania, whose company, founded in Vermont, does much of its business in Latin America while based in Mount Pleasant.
Karl Faller, a former consultant, got the idea for his company while working with former client AT&T. In interviews with AT&T’s biggest customers, asking what the communications giant could do for them, Faller kept getting the same answer.
“They said, ‘We’re all globalizing and we need to globalize our local networks and we don’t know how to do that,’” Faller said.
Then he discovered that AT&T had global expansion plans in Europe and Asia, but didn’t plan to expand into Latin America for several years.
“Within a month, I was on a plane to Santiago (Chile),” Faller said.
Taking advantage of the only deregulated country in South America that also had a robust infrastructure, Faller used Chile as a network hub to access Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other South American countries. The company Faller founded, originally called Telecom Latin America, sought niche markets and businesses that wanted to compete with AT&T.
At the time, the telecommunications industry was riding the wave created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a major industry overhaul that allowed any communications company to compete against another in any market.
“I left the very comfortable consulting business and jumped into the telecom industry and then it was just one big roller coaster ride,” Faller said. “I get fatigued just thinking about it.”
The company’s first client was American Commercial Barge Lines, a division of CSX, which ran a barge line carrying soybeans in Argentina. Telecom set up data feeds from the shipping manifests in Argentina to the company’s computer center in Jeffersonville, Ind., phasing out faxes and other forms of manual data transfer.
While Telecom covered all of South American, it did not immediately have access to Mexico.
“That was a big hole,” Faller said. “We could go into a country and if they needed service in three cities, you could guarantee one of those was in Mexico.”
Telecom eventually gained service in Mexico by partnering with MCI International and doing business in the company’s Mexican offices instead of through the U.S. group.
Branching out
Telecom began a period of expansion, branching out from Latin America. It began providing data connectivity for the U.S. Treasury and various U.S. embassies. Its expansion included working with reservation centers for cruise ships, forming alliances with South American data companies such as Telmex and Telefonica, and installing fiber optic cable for a German company doing business in Mexico.
“We’re doing what we need to do to be the dominant player in some of the tiniest segments of the world,” Faller said. “The one thing we are rock-solid on is being technology innovators.”
In 2000, most of Telecom’s European suppliers were going bankrupt, and in 2002 the company returned to focus on its Latin American roots.
“We kept getting better at Latin America because we had strong relationships with the dominant technology providers in all of the countries,” Faller said. “We wanted to look, act, feel and behave like locals instead of going in there with a lot of bravado, and that worked well.”
Mexico recently went through a significant infrastructure change similar to what the United States went through five years ago, when large amounts of new capacity drove bandwidth prices down by more than 90%. Many U.S. companies doing business in Mexico may not be aware that infrastructure improvements have created greater capacity and higher quality at a lower cost, Faller said.
“Any company with operations in Mexico needs to review and consider upgrading its communications networks immediately, especially if the networks are a year or more old,” Faller said.
Nine months ago, Telecom International made a major change in its business philosophy because Faller thought the company was underselling its services and underplaying what it could provide. The company is now increasing the number of technologies and services it provides while cutting back on the number of companies it serves.
The company’s newest focus is the offshore oil exploration and production industry. The shift involves the development of technologies that transfer data from offshore oil platforms to software companies that make the data available in real time via the Internet.
One new partner is eLynx Technologies of Tulsa, Okla.
“We were looking for someone to provide end-to-end connectivity in locations both in Iraq and Brazil,” said Ray McDaniel, manager of sales engineering for eLynx. “Faller is a good match for us, because just about everything we’ve done has been domestic and some of our customers now are asking us about serving international markets.”
Business in the Middle East
Another new project is the design of a network for Burren Energy, an oil exploration and production company based in the United Kingdom that has a base camp and six field rigs in Turkmenistan, which borders Iran, Afghanistan and the Caspian Sea.
Doing business in Middle East is presenting new challenges for Telecom International.
“Not to make light of the situation, but it’s very different providing oil field services in a war zone versus providing services in a relatively stable economy,” said Courtney Faller, Karl’s son and Telecom’s director of operations.
Courtney Faller said Telecom’s latest proposal in Iraq would involve delivering equipment in an armored, bulletproof container that would provide protection during an insurgent attack.
“That’s not something you’re involved with when providing service to some oil rig off the coast of Brazil,” he said.
Courtney Faller is one of only six employees at Telecom International, which outsources most of its business, including marketing, sales, distribution and suppliers.
Lean organization
Karl Faller said the Mount Pleasant company is a tightly managed virtual corporation in terms of organizational style.
“Financially, it never made sense for us to try to do this inside,” Karl Faller said. “We did not want to be tied to a facility or a technology or anything where we had to worry about capacity utilization.”
As a virtual network operator, Telecom International could be headquartered almost anywhere. Faller founded his company while living in Vermont, but moved to Charleston in 2000 and into offices at I’On in 2004. He had visited the area years before as a consultant for a division of Westvaco and had not forgotten the city.
“I remembered it being a really great place,” he said. “We took our first family vacation here in 1989.”
After starting with reasonable growth and then hitting a flat period, Telecom International has been profitable since 1999, Faller said.
“At one point in time, we had $1 million in credit with Wachovia and at our peak had $750,000 drawn against it,” Faller said. “Between 1999 and 2000 we paid all of our debt down to zero and have stayed debt-free since then.”
Faller said he never imagined he would head a company of his own.
“I never expected to be on the other side of the table, ever,” he said. “I never thought I’d be running one of those companies like the ones I was consulting with.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version