ExecutiveBiz: Why did you take the job of President and CEO of SunRocket?

Lisa Hook:

Primarily because I like the space, VOIP. It's a new market. It didn't exist even in 2003, and this year there will be about 7 million subscribers. By 2009 there should be close to 30 million subscribers. So it's just an exploding market place. And I think that SunRocket, because of the two founders, is uniquely positioned to be a big winner in the market.

ExecutiveBiz: How So?

Lisa Hook:

Well, there is only one other significant independent voice over IP company Vonage. Vonage, right now, is huge compared to SunRocket. But from a brand positioning point of view, it's really focused on the early adopter and somewhat technologically advanced consumer. SunRocket has a friendly mass market brand position in pricing so that when the inflection point comes this year or early next year for mass market consumer adoption, SunRocket will be well positioned to become the most significant player in the market. I look at this as a situation very similar to Prodigy and AOL in the 1994-1995 coming where Prodigy was the number one player with well-known backers like IBM and Sears selling the service and AOL was an unknown. But AOL had better positioning with respect to the mass market so that when the inflection point occurred, they were well positioned to become the dominant player in the field. And I think the same thing will happen for SunRocket.

ExecutiveBiz: How does SunRocket differentiate?

Lisa Hook:

The technologies as far as the consumer is concerned today - the product experience and the product itself - is very similar. I think we have a dramatically easier installation experience. We offer enhanced 911to every single new customer where Vonage is not able to do so. And because we're on a pure IP platform, we will be able to (over the next year to 18 months) significantly differentiate our product to the consumer as far as applications.

ExecutiveBiz: What is the basis for your customers-business or residential?

Lisa Hook:

It's primarily residential and we're marketing only into the residential market right now. However, a number of our customers operate small and home-based businesses, so we do touch that market.

Read the full interview here.

I had a business trip scheduled on Valentine's Day that I couldn't reschedule. I was very disappointed. Since I had only been married for one year I wanted to celebrate the special day with my husband.

We had left messages for each other throughout the morning and afternoon. Walking back to my hotel it seemed as though the whole world was celebrating Valentine's Day. I must have seen what seemed like 100 floral delivery trucks and couples together at lunch and dinner. My cell phone rang as I walked into the hotel lobby and as I flipped open my phone I saw it was my husband calling from home. I was happy that he was calling but wished it was a local number displayed, meaning he would be where I was.

I lost the connection when I got into the elevator. As I walked down the hall I called him back at home and he answered. Tonight I really wanted to be with him. He suggested I call him back after I got settled in my room. As I opened the door I couldn't believe my eyes. My husband was standing in my hotel room with flowers and behind him on the hotel desk was the SunRocket Gizmo. I was so happy to see him but still couldn't believe it. From all the phone calls I thought he was still at home in Maryland.

Thanks to SunRocket's technology my husband was able to give me the best Valentine's Day surprise ever.

Genuine Value: You will receive a great service at a great price.

Unconditional Satisfaction: You have the right to a reasonable refund if we fail to perform to your satisfaction.

Bottom-Line Disclosure: We will fully disclose and explain all charges, rates, taxes, and fees before you sign up for SunRocket service.

No Bogus Charges: We will never add bogus "fees" and "surcharges" that masquerade as government-mandated or government-specified assessments. All taxes, fees and surcharges listed on your invoice will be direct pass-through assessments paid at the direction of federal, state, or local authorities.

Common Sense Resolution: Policies will never stand in the way of doing the right thing. All SunRocket representatives have the power to use reasonable judgment to address your concerns and "make it right".

No Cancellation Penalties: We will not penalize you for our failure to deliver upon your expectations. You can discontinue SunRocket service at any time without hassle or cancellation fees.

Privacy: No information about you or your SunRocket service will be disclosed to third parties, unless authorized by law or in order to enable or deliver your services.

Input, Feedback & Response: You have the right to be heard. Your suggestions and comments will be recorded and communicated to SunRocket personnel with the authority to take appropriate action. SunRocket will make all reasonable efforts to acknowledge and respond accordingly.

Dignity & Respect: You will be treated with the utmost dignity and respect in all dealings with SunRocket and company personnel.

Integrity & Trust: We endeavor to fully inform you of available options so you can make timely and informed choices. We will never abuse your trust through deceit, exploitation, neglect, manipulation, or discrimination.
Sunrocket - The no 'gotcha' phone company!

"After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of discontinuing its operations as you know it. Therefore SunRocket will no longer be able to provide its customers with the phone service that its customers have been accustomed to.

However, two service providers are assisting and offering to provide SunRocket customers the opportunity to sign up for their services. Both providers have agreed to become preferred providers with special pricing for the SunRocket customers to enable them to migrate their telephone service. Of course, there are other providers and each individual customer can make their own decision as to which carrier they wish to transition to.

Emails to the SunRocket customers are currently being sent with more detailed information on how to sign up with the two service providers. The email address of the SunRocket customers that is on record is the address being used to send emails to the customers.

We realize this is a very difficult and uncertain period for the SunRocket customers. With these two preferred providers, the customers will have the opportunity to transfer telephone services.

An affiliate of Sherwood Partners, LLC is managing the process as the Assignee for the benefit of creditors.

Creditors to SunRocket will receive a notice within the next 30 days in regards to the general assignment and for the filing of claims in the liquidation process of SunRocket."

10. Failure Framework: Hiring telco execs in CXO positions out of the gate. Who else to piss away money the fastest on "future proofing" while the sysarch has to explain why these "web servers" are necessary?

9. Gotcha: Claiming a "no-gotcha" company while maintaining strict radio silence when things were going wrong.

8. From bad to worse: Hiring the same people responsible of a major loss in shareholder value at AOL to run Sunrocket. Of course, they covered their butts and so this is impossible to prove. I'll mention this: nobody in their 40's "retires" from a VP position. That's jargon for not being able to find a new job before it becomes plain as day you suck at your current one.

7. We tanked like this last time: Telco execs hiring ex-telco NOC staff to run what's essentially a dot-com network hauling primarily UDP traffic. To their credit most came around to running internet systems, but this was much harder than it needed to be. The bitching of the "seasoned Telecom execs" about Linux not being UNIX and then one of their stars tanking a UNIX machine (Solaris... that's UNIX, right?) by typing "hostname help" at the root prompt did little to point out their own irony.

6. Improvement aversion: vertically scaling session border controllers originally purchased as a stop-gap measure while politicking to have a solution with 1/20th the per-subscriber cost in back office equipment (and scales horizontally) taken off the map. Not to mention it provided a gateway to the Jabber protocol's Voip (can you say peering with GoogleTalk?) service. Can't do that - it could make us popular.

5. The Ostrich: One exec signs a deal for a SQL Server-based billing system (read: runs Windows, not UNIX) with no due diligence. Want to know why Sunrocket could not actually make money? They could not bill. The result: Call detail records were present three times in the billing database with the call merging done in-database. A perl script would have been 20 times faster. A funny one was that it was the same exec that called a meeting to explain the "web server line item" asking why this was needed, what this thing called Linux was - and then promptly complained that SQL Server cost money, and nixing the enterprise choice so fail-over could work.

4. The Ostrich 2.0: Deploying (I don't know if it ever went live) the next billing system on servers with no floating point processors (Sun T1000 systems). Now fine, billing systems should count tenths of pennies or so (i.e. not need floating point), but Oracle 10g sure does, and programmers sometimes forget that you're quickly down to two digits of precision when daisy-chaining floating point calculations. Are the T1000's even Oracle certified?

3. The Sheep: Outsourcing development and call center without actually agreeing to a development process in house. And then wondering why things fail, take twice as long, or end up canceled. Repeat after me: The good thing about outsourcing development to India is you get exactly what you specify. The bad thing about outsourcing to India is you get back exactly what you specify. If you're a bank, fine, you probably had 20 years to sort your process and procedure out - doing it as a dot-com is an express ticket to dot-gone. Oh, and the project managers that were not allowed to manage projects... Wait! Innovation was outsourced to ... AOL execs. Yaaay!

2. Security? That's the sysarch's problem: SR could have called itself the official VoIP provider of Al-Quaeda for a while - the session border controllers were so bottlenecked that authentication was effectively off at times, and ATA (the box that gives you dial tone) configs were unencrypted. Of little consolation is that your account password is the same as the account number ... hmmm. Too bad the sysarchs weren't usually allowed on the session border controllers.

1. Penny wise, pound foolish: The whole thing was rolled out seam-of-the-pants style. To the first 7 month team's credit, it all mostly worked (except believing some vendors, like the SBC people, that their capacity assessments were actually accurate). Conveniently, Mr. "what's-this-webserver-thing" canceled the inital lab to diagnose or load-test anything because it would be too expensive, and he did not want to run another 60A of power to the machine room. That was until the building engineer got all huffy showing the circuit distribution box hitting 166F on his thermal cam, so at least the circuits came.