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I'd amend that to "...important hubs for what is left of telecom." It's just the Schumpeter cycle at work. The amount of money dumped on the area, SarbOx regul

I'd amend that to "...important hubs for what is left of telecom." It's just the Schumpeter cycle at work. The amount of money dumped on the area, SarbOx regulation changes, even Enron[1], and the overt abuse of the H1B visa left it crippled relative to what it once was compared to the span of say, 1985 to 2005. [1] these things came up in funding meetings at various times in the area. "you do know that Enron is Houston, right?" "It's still Texas." I know of no healthy telecom firms left. I (willfully) know nothing of gaming.

amyjess 10y ago
I work at Masergy. We're a mid-size (~500 employees) telecom based in Plano, TX. We are doing very, very well. I don't think I'm allowed to share numbers, but this is the first company I've worked at where I don't have to worry about whether or not the company will be out of money by the end of the year. I remember my first employer, a small UC security company that eventually got bought by Avaya in a rather successful exit; every year, we played the game of "will the VCs go for another round of funding or leave us to die?". I don't have to worry about that here. We've also won a lot of awards lately, including placing on the list of 5000 fastest-growing companies. But maybe we have different definitions of telecoms. I think, in the present day, any company that does UC and/or cloud networking (we do both) should count as part of "the telecom industry", because they fill the same niche as the traditional telecoms. We've also got IBM SoftLayer and FireHost/Armor here too, plus Amazon has recently opened some offices in Dallas (a good friend of mine interviewed with them for an AWS support job here; didn't get it though).
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Thanks much for the update. I extremely am glad to hear things are going well. It got really dicey there from around 2002 onward. But from 1985 ( or before, really ) to then, Dallas was poppin'. We almost have to have different versions of what is meant by "telecoms" because it's all changed radically. The optical business is pretty bleak. It's the last vestige of the more old-school telecoms left. You also see Cisco pivoting these days.
  - hga 10y ago
    Where wasn't it dicey in telecom in 2002 onward? It's been noted the dot.com bust was more of a telecom bust than anything else. I had the ... special privilege of going to work for Lucent in January when they had 106,000 employees (and an Oracle licence for that many seats). When I left in December they were on their way to a planned 35,000, and were eventually bought by Alcatel. It could have been worse, look at Nortel....
    - hga 10y ago
      Oops, that was "January 2001" when I started at Lucent, by 2002 they were clearly doomed, e.g. the last project I worked on, a media gateway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway to pair with their then very successful SoftSwitch), was deemed utterly essential for Lucent's future (I read the marketing research documents, which said there was no future for integrated switching systems like the storied 5ESS, who's people worked on this project), and the project was clearly doomed. E.g. not only was first it absolutely minimally resourced, it was then not spared company wide layoffs, and they made a point of boasting about laying off one of the most visible and productive members of the team, undoubtedly to show us no one was deemed essential, and also undoubtedly because he was pointing out problems. The project was canceled not all that long after I left, "and the rest is history".

amyjess 10y ago

I work at Masergy. We're a mid-size (~500 employees) telecom based in Plano, TX. We are doing very, very well. I don't think I'm allowed to share numbers, but this is the first company I've worked at where I don't have to worry about whether or not the company will be out of money by the end of the year. I remember my first employer, a small UC security company that eventually got bought by Avaya in a rather successful exit; every year, we played the game of "will the VCs go for another round of funding or leave us to die?". I don't have to worry about that here. We've also won a lot of awards lately, including placing on the list of 5000 fastest-growing companies. But maybe we have different definitions of telecoms. I think, in the present day, any company that does UC and/or cloud networking (we do both) should count as part of "the telecom industry", because they fill the same niche as the traditional telecoms. We've also got IBM SoftLayer and FireHost/Armor here too, plus Amazon has recently opened some offices in Dallas (a good friend of mine interviewed with them for an AWS support job here; didn't get it though).

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Thanks much for the update. I extremely am glad to hear things are going well. It got really dicey there from around 2002 onward. But from 1985 ( or before, really ) to then, Dallas was poppin'. We almost have to have different versions of what is meant by "telecoms" because it's all changed radically. The optical business is pretty bleak. It's the last vestige of the more old-school telecoms left. You also see Cisco pivoting these days.
- hga 10y ago
  Where wasn't it dicey in telecom in 2002 onward? It's been noted the dot.com bust was more of a telecom bust than anything else. I had the ... special privilege of going to work for Lucent in January when they had 106,000 employees (and an Oracle licence for that many seats). When I left in December they were on their way to a planned 35,000, and were eventually bought by Alcatel. It could have been worse, look at Nortel....
  - hga 10y ago
    Oops, that was "January 2001" when I started at Lucent, by 2002 they were clearly doomed, e.g. the last project I worked on, a media gateway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway to pair with their then very successful SoftSwitch), was deemed utterly essential for Lucent's future (I read the marketing research documents, which said there was no future for integrated switching systems like the storied 5ESS, who's people worked on this project), and the project was clearly doomed. E.g. not only was first it absolutely minimally resourced, it was then not spared company wide layoffs, and they made a point of boasting about laying off one of the most visible and productive members of the team, undoubtedly to show us no one was deemed essential, and also undoubtedly because he was pointing out problems. The project was canceled not all that long after I left, "and the rest is history".