As seen in the April 5, 2010  COMPTEL Connection

ACM Group, Inc, dba ATLANTIC-ACM 
Headquarters: Boston
www.atlantic-acm.com

Q: What does your company do and how long has it been in operation?
A: Strategy consulting, research and benchmarking. Our operations date back to the late 1980s, but the company was officially formed in 1991.

Q: To what do you attribute your company’s success in the communications industry?
A: In our strategy consulting work, we have always taken on the big questions. We do market sizing and opportunity assessments in-house (our own proprietary library), so our confidence level in our advice is high.  For more company-specific issues – such as how can we improve our operations, introduce a product, satisfy our customers, or determine growth of a product by metro area – we enjoy determining how to cost-effectively find answers to a challenging issue.  Over time, our advice and market projections have proved accurate, so we have succeeded where others have failed.  In our benchmarking work, trust, consistency and deep market knowledge have proven crucial.

Q: What have been the biggest obstacles your company has faced in the marketplace?
A: As a vendor to the industry, we ride the same peaks and valleys as operators and equipment providers.  However, we have been able to steer our clients toward the best possible paths even in challenging conditions, which is why our clients -- and by extension, ATLANTIC-ACM -- are thriving.

Q: What do you see as your greatest challenges going forward? 
A: Tracking increasingly complex relationships amid software, hardware and intra- and inter-industry convergence.  The telecommunications industry is the fuel for the economy.  The various ways in which networks are used by, and interact with, industries of all sorts generates the seemingly opposing needs of a broader knowledge base and greater specialization.  In our line of work, we cannot choose one or the other.  We need to make sense of a world with business models ranging from three years to three decades, and reduce that information with the basic goal of helping our clients successfully navigate, and to the extent possible, shape, market events.  For us, this means a deeper, more complex proprietary library that allows us to plot the trajectories of new trends based on historic data, and to rapidly evaluate risks and rewards when "new economy" trends and models appear for which there is no historic correlation. 

Q: What have been some of your company’s most recent achievements (new customer wins, new service/product deployment, etc.)?
A: We have expanded our report card series of benchmarking studies, which was founded on wholesale performance evaluations, to incorporate retail and wireless performance data.   

Q: Why is it important for your company to be a COMPTEL member?
A: We believe that COMPTEL is an important voice in the telecommunications industry.  Setting aside important networking and educational opportunities facilitated by COMPTEL, its lobbying efforts are vital because decisions that impact our industry often are decided by people with little knowledge of how this highly complex industry operates.