Interop adds employees, facilities in Texas: Introduces two new products at CTIA IT

At a time when many companies are feeling the pinch of the recession with fewer contracts and having to downsize their workforces, Fort Meyers, Fla.-based Interop Technologies is using the downturn to move its operations center to the Dallas area and grow its employee base.
The company, which offers core messaging products, device management and gateway connectivity services to wireless carriers, is in the process of moving some operations to Texas to take advantage of the talent pool in the area, said Damian Sazama, VP of marketing and public relations at Interop. The company’s new operations center is located in the Las Colinas business district in Irving, Texas, and will replace a leased facility the company uses in Atlanta. The company is spending about $3 million to acquire the building and put in capital improvements. When construction is complete in early 2010, the center will support 70 to 80 employees. “We do our own code development so we need people who can write good code,” Sazama said. The company will likely hire up to 50 employees in the next year in a variety of areas, including sales and engineering positions.
The self-proclaimed telecom corridor, which includes Richardson, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, has not been extremely hurt by the recent recession, said John Jacobs, senior VP of the Metroplex Technology Business Council, a nonprofit business association representing the high-tech industry in northern Texas. The 2001-2003 recession devastated the area as fiber-optic companies laid of employees. In contrast, even though large tech employers like Nortel Networks are in bankruptcy, those employees are expected to be hired by L.M. Ericsson, which is buying some of Nortel’s assets. “We may be losing the (Nortel) name and the company, but we’re not losing the talent,” Jacobs said.
Plus, Richardson-based SNRLabs just won a contract to provide its Advanced Connection Management Suite product to Intel Corp. for its second-generation handheld platform, which should be good for the area, Jacobs said. In addition, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks are opening LTE labs in the region.
For its part, Interop is making an aggressive push into new markets. The company recently won the contract to provide messaging services to Cox Communications Inc., and earlier this summer committed $30 million during the next three years to enter the Caribbean and Latin American markets. Virtually all of its projects for wireless customers include some form of customization for that customer’s particular needs, Sazama said, thus the need for more support people. The new facility will enable the company to turn around code much quicker, which means its customers get new features to market faster.
Two new products indutroduced show
Interop introduced two new products at CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment 2009 show last week. The company’s Scope device management solution allows customer service representatives to handle device problems on the first call, said Sazana. “We simplified the user interface,” so lower-level customer service representatives can diagnose some of the more common handsets problems, he said. The Scope device management solution sits next to Interop’s over-the-air solution and chooses which platform is better to fix the device. The solution can be configured to automatically reset the device configuration to the best setting, taking that work out of the hands of the customer service rep.
The company also introduced its IP Messaging Convergence Solution, which gives carriers seamless messaging continuity as they move from 3G services to 4G network rollouts. Because the solution is already IP-based, carriers don’t need to worry about if and when they should move their SMS and MMS offerings to a 4G network because the solution supports 4G networks and legacy networks simultaneously.