it’s unix, not eunuchs

Two weeks ago Carol Wilson wrote a story for Telephony Online detailing how Embarq has signed an agreement to rebadge one of their NOCs(Network Operations Center) to Nokia.  When I first read the title I wasn’t surprised in the least as this has been happening for about 4 years now with other telephony companies.  I pretty much just assumed that all companies were doing some forms of this, in fact I know that Hallmark.com was rebadged to IBM a few years back as well.

I suppose I should explain the word re-badged.  Rebadging is when a company gives another company one of it’s divisions and signs an agreement to pay the second company to run the division for them.  As a part of these agreements the parent company usually takes some of their employees and force them to accept jobs at the new company or they will be fired without benefits.  There are some other companies that do this a bit more kindly, but it’s usually as I described above.  Employees call it rebadging because one day they have a Hallmark ID badge and then on the next Monday they’ll have an IBM ID badge.

Frankly, I’ve witnessed several of these re-badging efforts and they have all been disasters.  The only good thing that ever comes of it, is that cowardly managers sometimes manage to get rid of lousy employees by suddenly transferring them to a division that is about to be re-badged.  Now, stockholders are always told that the company will save a ton of money by getting rid of the division, however it never really plays out that way.  You get a sub-par performance by the new division, you terrify the remaining employees in the company, and as soon as the contract comes up for renegotiation the recipient of the division will charge so much that the company is forced to give up on all the savings they were promised.

So, back to the main purpose of this post.  I would have mailed Carol Wilson or commented on the her article if Telephony Online allowed such interaction, but it doesn’t.  So I will instead here mention that re-badging is not a new trend in North America.

You can read the article at Telephony Online and I have to give Kudos to AskCALEA for linking to it.