Staying power. More than ever, it's the one trait service providers want to see in their vendors, having been burned too often by suppliers that made promises they couldn't keep.

And while cost reduction and revenue generation were the buzzwords coming from exhibitors at Supercomm 2002, keeping up appearances resonated nearly as much, as many vendors spent the week trying to convince investors and customers they would be around for the long haul.

Supercomm's Telecom Investor Forum, as it usually does, highlighted several start-up companies with new approaches to old problems. As in past years, most of these companies used the forum to fight for recognition and perhaps the investment that could follow. But some, like Eftia Software Solutions, which has been around since 1997, may have been fighting for their lives.

Eftia, unapologetically late for its presentation, lobbied for future investment by emphasizing its product maturity, global presence and revenue flow. The company's flagship ordering, inventory and provisioning product, Master.Scribe 4.0, culminates an $80 million, four-year investment.

“You wouldn't be funding R&D. We have a mature product,” Eftia Chief Financial Officer Clarke Herring said to potential investors. With a fully developed product and no clear winner in the service management space, Eftia is in the right spending place in telecom, he added.

Valaran survived to see its second Supercomm and celebrated by announcing KMC Telecom as a customer for its dynamic business framework called, simply, the Valaran Software Suite.

The company also expanded its portfolio to include a Mobile Blade product, which extends back office operations to mobile users. Understanding the niche it must find in today's stingy capital market, Valaran relies on system integrators and channel partners for getting its product plugged in to support the transitional journey from legacy to next-generation operations support systems (OSS).

“Our dynamic business framework comes along with legacy OSSs without taking them out of play,” said Andrew Maunder, CEO of Valaran.

Wil Cochran, president and CEO at Altreus, a 3-year-old service fulfillment company that provides service creation and delivery solutions to the likes of NTT and Japan Telecom, agreed. “We don't replace or supplant legacy OSSs. Obviously, carriers aren't in the mood to do that today,” he said.

“The only way to get carriers to buy hardware again is with the right service fulfillment platform,” Cochran added.

As telecom history has taught us, there is always more that one way to do something. The more veteran OSS players have been trying them all (see story on page 44).