2006
In the runup to the merger with what remained of MCI, in 2005, I was made responsible for bringing Verizon's commercial IP product TLS, or Transparent LAN Service, and Gigabit Ethernet, which I had managed since they were offered out of BANI (Bell Atlantic Network Integration), into the Verizon Wholesale organization, in the runup to combining TLS with MCI's IP products. MCI had a much larger IP offering, and it was vital that all of the IP offerings were brought to one single post merger organization. The order systems that needed to be created to achieve this were created by our software development teams at Verizon Data Services India, in Chennai and Bangalore, as well as Verizon in the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, where mainframe systems were done. By the end of 2006, the products had been successfully merged, and MCI's operations rolled into the Verizon Business subsidiary, the successor to Verizon Advanced Data. Apart from the Product Manager and Development Manager for TLS, I was an auditing member of the Merger Committee, the team of managers allowed to work directly with MCI staff on operations preparedness under "silence" conditions, prior to the company receiving merger approval from the Department of Justice.