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Brightstar Corp. recently landed in Cambridge, establishing a North American beachhead for its services division and hoping to be a shining star guiding mobile operators with the light from its business intelligence.
The operation that now calls Cambridge home — the operator services unit — is not a brand-new business. President Jeffrey Gower had been running it from Melbourne, Australia, for nearly five years, after it was spun out of Miami-based parent Brightstar, which is a global distributor of handsets to retailers and operators. But Gower brought the unit here quietly in August mainly to access talent in the Greater Boston area, he said.
The 15 people that Brightstar has locally include product development engineers in addition to sales and support staff. What those people sell is consulting services based on the decades of customer experience that the parent Brightstar has accumulated as a distributor of wireless handsets to retailers and cellular operators, distributing more than 80 million handsets per year in 50 countries.
According to Gower, the services unit has taken that data and developed analysis algorithms that can help someone like Verizon Wireless — which is a customer in North America — decide which of the hundreds of mobile handset models will be most attractive to the kinds of customers that will bring them the greatest profit.
“We started realizing that operators were really good at putting up networks but they don’t understand what the consumers really want,” Gower said. “The past with operators used to be about acquisition of customers and not about the value of customers, but the shift is that (today) it is not just about more customers but about the highest-value customers.”
That use of technology to add value to a business’s operations has drawn the attention of MIT Sloan School of Management professor Charlie Fine, who has joined the Brightstar board of directors.
Gower said that the target market for Brightstar’s service unit is the smaller, country-specific carrier as opposed to the larger, regional carrier. While it wouldn’t turn down AT&T Inc. as a client in North America, Gower said, Brightstar would be more interested in going after someone like Sprint, for example.
The main driver for using Brightstar’s services, Gower said, is how difficult it is for an operator to keep track of an industry that changes faster than almost any other market out there.
“In the telecom industry, that is higher than just about everywhere — the car industry, a new platform every seven years, the airplanes every 30 years,” he said. “In mobile you can have a new platform within a year and a device may only last three months.”
Being a division of a global corporation with 2,100 employees in 38 offices worldwide, the unit doesn’t have a standard profit model that a startup might have. It does have profit goals to send back to the Brightstar parent for each global region it is in, Gower said, but he wouldn’t give out financial details. He did say the local operation was on track to grow to about 35 full-time employees.
Gower said he knew the company needed to locate where it could find the best talent in developing its analysis products.
“We believe the hub of that is Boston, and Cambridge specifically,” Gower said.
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