By Tim McElligott

During his keynote address at B/OSS Live!, Harold Teets, senior vice president, CTO and CIO of tw telecom, noted the continued growth and upwardly mobile financial performance of his company through the downturn and credited the continued investment is back-office systems and its people.

tw telecom has posted 26 consecutive quarters of revenue growth as a managed networking services provider in 75 markets across the U.S. Teets says much of that is due to a strategy, in which, despite the economic downturn, the company continued to invest hundreds of millions in people, processes and systems.

“In fact, during that recent downturn we didn’t layoff a single person and we continued to pay merit increases, bonuses and maintained health benefits,” Teets said.

Satisfied employees made it much easier to provide a good customer experience, he said. And the investment helped the company achieved nearly touchless provisioning and activation systems and improved their customer net-performance score.

Still, the company managed to cut costs by eliminating a large degree of network elements and taking advantage of virtualization technologies in their data center.

But the investment won’t stop, Teets said. And one of the areas the company plans to invest in is end-to-end application management. “As we listened to our customers we heard loud and clear they need us to help them with the management of their networks and applications,” Teets said. “So we are focused on the need for true customer business enablement.”

Teets said focusing future investment on customer-oriented solutions has brought the company more clarity around how to transform the back office. “One of the factors driving transformation is the convergence of the network and IT and applications and services being closer to the network. What is needed is a holistic view of the application,” he said.

Teets will be looking at investing in a new kind of intelligent network that is application-aware and that enables services. Business applications should be aware of changes to their environment and be able to make those changes visible, controllable and ultimately adaptable.