What Is The Foundry?

The Foundry is an advanced training, research and development organization based in Pau, France. A new European headquarters in Paris and an advanced training center in Pau, France have recently been established to develop retraining programs, promote technology research and launch new ventures as part of a major job creation initiative that the Foundry is undertaking on behalf of its client, SigEx, Inc., pioneer of the new Enhanced Communications industry. SigEx has mandated the Foundry to oversee an initiative to re-train and re-deploy three thousand communications professionals over the next three years to participate in this emerging industry. The new Enhanced Communications industry will require a minimum critical mass of newly trained engineers to deliver and install enhanced telecommunications products and services on a global basis.

This job creation initiative is driven in part by current circumstances in the telecommunications industry and opportunities to improve upon available services. After exceptional growth for several years, the telecom industry is facing a major downturn amid drops in equipment purchase, massive layoffs, dried-up venture capital investments and the failure of the incubator model. As a consequence, the industry needs to reinvent itself to create the high-value services and products of the Enhanced Communications industry.

The Foundry’s Mission

The Foundry's objectives are to re-train engineers and business people to launch sustainable project companies for the Enhanced Communications industry; promote research and provide a global platform for our strategic customers to deliver valued services and applications; and build the Enhanced Communications industry. SigEx, Inc., a technology holding company based in Sarasota, Florida, and SigEx Ventures, Inc., a private investment fund, are driving the Enhanced Communications initiative. SigEx SuperPBX and SigEx NanoData have mandated the Foundry to train and select the best development, business and strategic communications teams to build their broadband service delivery and terabyte data warehousing platforms.

The Foundry’s development programs provide fully-funded viable structures for business R&D, to address alpha-beta development projects for strategic customers that include global telecommunications carriers, network equipment manufacturers, information technology companies, and digital content providers. The projects developed by the Foundry are all pre-funded by the SigEx Ventures investment fund and are sustainable for a period of 12 to 18 months. The most successful of these may become sustainable practices. The first Enhanced Communications project companies have emerged since the Foundry's opening in early 2003.

The Foundry has established a global European training and development center in Pau, France, which is accepting student-candidates for pre-funded project-practices. The mission of the center in Pau will be to promote technology research, prepare engineers and business professionals for positions in the Enhanced Communications industry, and launch project-practices into emerging US, European and Chinese markets. The facility will also offer educational programs to SigEx clients on a global basis through distance learning. The Foundry will be accepting research grant applications and Ph.D. candidates in telecommunications, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, economics and business, and marketing communications practices.

Description of the Foundry

The Foundry projects for SigEx will support numerous technology leaders including: SAP, Vivendi, SONY, AOL Time Warner, eBay, Cisco, IBM, Sun, Apple, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and international carriers. The mandate to build the new communications industry and support existing telecommunications infrastructures will be deployed with Fortune 1000 strategic customers.

What is Enhanced Communications?

The Practice: The Foundry is much more than a think tank where great practices and ideas get nurtured. The Foundry is a model of real economic life that tests the ideas, the teams, the technology, the revenue models and the culture against actual business scenarios to see whether they have the right to succeed in the outside world. The validation includes direct practicing with strategic customers, publications and patents as well as financial modeling and analysis. A short intense process creates the right competitive environment to breed excellence.

The Project Leaders: The training also includes new advanced business practices and technology methodologies such as extreme programming or user profiling and best of practices like Real Options, Fifth Discipline and Strategic Marketing. In addition, Enhanced Communications training is provided at all layers of technologies from chips to applications. Thus, the Foundry’s re-training and job creation delivers excellence and positions the new Enhanced Communications industry on a successful path lead exclusively by our elite project leaders.

Enhanced Communications is a new approach to telecommunications that can provide secure access to data at any time, anywhere and on any communications device as a result of new system architecture that builds upon the existing telecom infrastructure. The scalable Enhanced Communications approach can bridge IP and non-IP networks using an open-pipe, multi-protocol, peer-to-peer architecture that will provide the foundation for the next major paradigm shift in the telecom and datacom industries.

After massive investments in more fiber optics and capacity, the telecommunications industry is realizing that the problem is not about the bandwidth, it’s about traffic. The underlying problems in the telecom industry today result in part from under-utilization of network resources and the inability to bridge incompatible networks to deliver data when and where customers want it. Network utilization, and with it communication industry revenue, could be increased significantly by perfecting the ability to deliver high-flow interactive services such as video on demand and real-time access to massive corporate data. These are long promised services that the current industry has failed to deliver. This inability today is not due to limited bandwidth, as is often thought, but to system architecture.

Technologies to enable the new Enhanced Communications industry include optimization of bandwidth usage (today at less then 1 percent in average), bridging of incompatible networks, advanced rights management, multi-channel wireless, new security models, and embedded and nano technology, among others.

Components of the Foundry

Candidates enter the Foundry on a voluntary basis and are awarded full scholarships by SigEx Ventures for the training they receive. Although the Foundry values candidates with certain profiles, candidates are assigned to two unique groups when entering the Foundry.

Project leaders step up to taking the lead and will need to prove and show their ability to lead, recruit and attract customers and capital on a weekly build basis. Not all candidates are suited for this extreme leadership responsibility and the challenges and rewards that it leads to. Strategic Customers and Foundry staff assist, promote and select only the best of practice project leaders.

Practitioners are challenged by the needs of Strategic Customers to develop their practice plans to deliver only the most advanced and best of practices tempered by "practical" deliverables that can lead to sustainable billable careers. Successful practitioners who complete the Foundry program will be hired with their project practices.

The SigEx Ventures investment fund provides pre-funding for all projects presented to the Foundry. Dedicated staff will be available in the Foundry to assist and support the constant grant, practice and new business development process around Enhanced Communications project practices.

Professional services is a consistent activity of the Foundry to address immediate Strategic Customer and project practices development needs. Candidates will be recruited from within the Foundry for these groups.

Research is an essential part of making progress on Enhanced Communications. Patents and publications are generated on a regular basis and collaboration with existing scientific labs as well as Ph.D. programs is promoted.

Words from the Founder, Chris Cantell - What is it really like ?

Foundry, which is known to be an uncommonly collaborative and supportive, practice leadership school is a seriously competitive environment and you have to be ready for anything. Thus, you should eliminate any false notions in your head of a gentle work-training, graduate engineering school, or M.B.A. type experience -- which is as it should be, for in real practice world, Darwinism rules. You should understand and appreciate the unique opportunity that you have at The Foundry to be challenged on many fronts (and on many practice fields), including working with people from various backgrounds and cultures.

In that regard, you should connect with a diverse group of student-candidates from around the world whose professional experiences range from working in Boston on the automation of General Electric's Factory-of-the-Future, conducting telecommunications and advanced Linux/PHP engineering for premier U.S. real-estate private equity investors to consulting on technology systems in the insurance industry. Fortunately, many of these new friends you will meet will temper the competitiveness of The Foundry. Just as you prepare for an exam on the economics of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", a new friend of yours who knows you are struggling to master these concepts will encourage you to work on your strategic customers - to secure those practice hours! All of these classmates will become rays of goodwill in a survival-of-the-fittest environment -- even when it isn't in their best interest to help you, since candidates are selected on a sustainability curve.

Christopher M. Cantell
Founder and CEO
The Foundry