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The Vision For Motive Is To Transform The Way
Consumers Install And Use The Next Generation Of IP Based Broadband Services
And Devices At Home And On The Go
Communications
Data Services
(MOTV-OTCPK)
Motive, Inc.
12515 Research Boulevard, Building 5
Austin, TX 78759-2220
Phone: 512-339-8335
Alfred T. Mockett
Chairman and CEO
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFOinterviews.com
Published – December 21, 2007
BIO:
Alfred Mockett, Chairman & CEO
Alfred Mockett joined Motive in February 2006 as
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. His career in technology and
telecommunications spans more than 30 years, working in both private and
public companies. Prior to joining Motive, Mr. Mockett served as Chairman
and Chief Executive Officer of American Management Systems Inc. (AMSY), the
$1 billion IT consulting and professional services company which was
acquired in 2004 by the CGI group. Before AMS, Mr. Mockett served on the
Executive Committee of BT for 10 years in a range of divisional capacities,
including Chief Executive Officer of BT Ignite, BT’s $6 billion
international broadband data and applications services business. Prior to
this role, Mr. Mockett led BT’s initiative to bring together all of the
company’s disparate international activities under BT Worldwide, a single
division to deliver on BT’s vision to be a major player in the global
communications marketplace. He has also held executive positions at Memorex
Telex and General Computer Systems Inc. Mr. Mockett graduated with honors
from the University of London.
Company Profile:
Motive provides service management
software for broadband and mobile data services. Motive’s software is
helping wireline, wireless, cable and satellite operators worldwide deliver
a new generation of IP-based services that seamlessly integrate voice, video
and data into a single, connected experience. With Motive, operators can
leverage one service management platform to automate and remotely manage key
customer touch points throughout the service lifecycle, across multiple
services, networks and devices. The result is a consistent, unified
experience for both customers and service providers that increases revenues
from new and converged services, reduces fulfillment and support costs, and
drives greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
CEOCFO: Mr. Mockett, what was your vision
when you became CEO of Motive and where are you today?
Mr. Mockett: “I came into a troubled
company. It was a company that was loved by customers, loved by employees
and had established an excellent market position, but it was in the penalty
box imposed by Wall Street because it had done the unthinkable; it had to
announce that it was going to restate prior earnings. I came into the
company with a threefold mission. First I needed to retool the management
team. I needed to build a world-class management team and that involved
looking for people that were long on telecom experience and long on public
company experience in addition to having small company and software
experience, then to blend the best of the outside with the best of the
inside talent. That team has been in place for about eighteen months. I
cannot stress enough the significant accomplishments of the team so far. The
second objective was to address the company’s past accounting issues and
resolve them. Over the last eighteen months we have systematically addressed
and resolved these non operating issues, installed the appropriate internal
controls and have become current with our published, albeit unaudited
financials and related information. The third objective was to craft a
compelling vision for the future, articulate the strategy to deliver on that
vision and establish and execute on a robust sort of business plan that
underpinned the strategy. I came in with three objectives and I think we as
a team can put a strong kick in the box for each of the three objectives.”
CEOCFO:
Please tell us about the business strategy; what you are doing and how you
are doing it?
Mr. Mockett: “Our vision is to
transform the way consumers install and use the next generation of IP based
broadband services and devices at home and on the go. Our target customer
set are the global communication service providers and we provide a suite of
software capabilities to those service providers that enables them to reduce
the cost of provisioning and ongoing support of broadband services, allowing
them to improve customer retention and customer satisfaction, and provide
them with incremental revenue streams. That is the business model.
Underpinning our vision is a five-pillar strategy, the first-pillar of the
strategy is to pursue profitable revenue growth by expanding our product
portfolio and we do this by investing a minimum of 20% of our revenue in
research and development on an annual basis. The second pillar to the
strategy is to achieve a singularity of focus, to focus exclusively on
communication service providers and this has entailed an orderly disposition
of our enterprise business so that we could focus on a single sector. Within
that sector, we address all four technologies wireline, wireless satellite,
and cable. The third pillar to the strategy is to expand our addressable
market into contiguous market space and that involved a major push into
mobility, providing a suite of capabilities in mobility for mobile device
management and mobile service management that were analogous to the
capabilities that we provided on the wireline side. The fourth pillar to the
strategy is to expand our range of business models by offering pay-as-you-go
alternatives as opposed to enterprise-wide licenses on term or perpetual
basis so that we could tie our growth to the growth of our customers’
customer base. The fifth and final pillar to the strategy is to embark on a
channel strategy involving focusing on the tier-one players of the world
with our direct resources but using large scale systems integrators and
large scale hardware manufacturers as channels to market at the global,
regional and local level to augment our direct sales capability. Those are
the five pillars to the strategy.”
CEOCFO: You
have a who’s who list of customers; what do you provide?
Mr. Mockett: “If you order a broadband
service, say a DSL service in the home, we would provide the software to the
likes of AT&T and BT that would allow them to activate and provision that
service and then on an ongoing basis provide service management all the way
to remote control. Therefore, if there was something wrong with your
broadband service, a person in the customer service center could remotely
seize control of your PC with your consent and then they would fix it and
hand it back to you all online and in real time. I assure you that from a
customer perspective that is a tremendous advantage.”
CEOCFO: Why
are customers choosing your software?
Mr. Mockett: “The competitive landscape
in our business has relatively few players say around five software players
and then a few hardware players which are trying to bundle the software with
the hardware. We believe that our strategic positioning is the correct one
in that we remain vendor independent and hardware agnostic. It means that
our customers can mix and match multiple vendors’ equipment in their
networks, but we can still service manage it across that range of hardware.”
CEOCFO:
What are the biggest areas of growth for you today, and do you see that
changing?
Mr. Mockett: “Our biggest area of growth
is a mobile service management. The number of complex devices being used,
mobile networks is growing exponentially. The Blackberrys, the TREOs the
PalmPilots, of the world; these are very complex devices involving
sophisticated setup and ongoing management. There is a tremendous point of
pain here for the network operators and service providers. The cost for them
to support an intelligent device in the network compared with a basic phone
is six or seven times the cost of the basic phone. The early adopters of the
Blackberry and Treo were corporate animals that were buffered from the
problems with their IT departments. The current take up comes from the like
of the soccer moms of the world who do not have the benefit of an IT
department. Therefore, the number of inbound calls in the first year on
these devices has ballooned from one to two calls in the first year to
twelve to fourteen. You can see how that puts a huge pressure on the
customer service center and it is no surprise that perhaps the number of
seats in the call centers to deal with this type of problem is doubling
every six months. There is a huge cost in customer service that needs
addressing, which creates the market for us.”
CEOCFO:
What is the financial picture of the company?
Mr. Mockett: “The financial picture is
much improved. We have put the accounting issues of the past squarely behind
us. As we stand today, Motive is debt-free, lawsuit-free, with sufficient
cash on hand for the immediately foreseeable future. We enjoy strong market
positions. We have a loyal and dedicated customer base, loyal and dedicated
employee base and we are back on the growth path with improving margins and
reducing losses. We have a strategic process under the way to scale the
company and we have a baseline plan to drive to cash flow neutrality and
break-even operating performance in the fourth quarter next year.”
CEOCFO: Why
should potential investors be interested and what might they miss about
Motive that should jump off the page?
Mr. Mockett: "At the moment we are
trading on the pink sheets; that is an imperfect market and as all CEOs
would say, I think it is severely undervalues the worth of my company. If I
look at the assets that make up this company, we have a blue chip customer
base of the top sixty to sixty-five communications network operators and
service providers in the world. Throughout all the trials and tribulations
of the last two years involving restating five years of financials and
literally doing a financial reconstruction involving every material revenue
transaction from January 1st, 2001, forward, we have not lost a
single customer as a result of financial activity. In addition, there have
been no operating issues, and on the contrary during that period we have
added some 25 new customers.”
CEOCFO:
What should people take away from this interview?
Mr. Mockett:
“Motive is alive and well and well on the way to recovery. It occupies a
unique position in its marketplace and has a wealth of intellectual assets
and has been restored on its path to being a growth company.”
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