It all disappeared Sept. 11, when one of the towers collapsed onto Verizon's operations center at 140 West St., tearing apart the giant cables the company had used to serve tens of millions of metropolitan-area DSL and landline phone customers.

As horrific as the experience was, Chief Technical Officer Mark A. Wegleitner said the tragedy served to focus Verizon as never before. Now, as the company replaces its patchwork network of wires and cables throughout lower Manhattan, it must gather its strength to address longer-term problems that have dogged the company since it was created.

Verizon is still grappling with complications arising from its birth from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE two years ago. The massively complex combination of networks and technologies was further complicated by the dot-com bust and economic recession, which took their toll on the company with the elimination of 10,000 jobs this year.

Not surprisingly, Wegleitner has been in the hot seat ever since joining Verizon from Bell Atlantic Network Services, where he was responsible for all technology and engineering. He is leading Verizon's drive into Internet telephony and its construction of an all-fiber-optic network at a time when Wall Street and Silicon Valley are watching the $115 billion bellwether company for signs of a turnaround in the communications industry.

Wegleitner recently spoke with CNET News.com about the various challenges facing Verizon, ranging from the Sept. 11 recovery to the convergence of voice and data.

Q: Verizon got hit very hard on Sept. 11. How were you able to get the New York City networks up and running in just a few days?
A: The stock market was the key. (The system) had to be up by the following Monday, and we made that happen.

How badly was your infrastructure hit?
Seven World Trade Center was right across the street from our 140 West St. facility. It fell into our 140 West St. facility. With all the fire hoses, dust and contamination in that area of New York City, virtually all of the equipment in the building was affected--including the cable vaults, where things had collapsed onto cables entering the building from beneath the street.

We had to put a lot of temporary fixes in place. We have pictures of major telephone cables, major fiber and copper cables hanging out of windows as high as the eighth floor so we could connect them to mainframes and out to customers in the buildings around that area. That (equipment) all went in on a very expedited basis, as you would imagine. We were refurbishing equipment in the building, battling with power and other problems. We got through all of that; the network is fundamentally running. Now we're going back and making that equipment permanent.

Did it give you an opportunity to try out some of the new technologies you've been waiting to use?
It will allow us to do that. At the time we were doing the recovery, we were more focused on getting something up and running, and in many cases putting in similar equipment was the way to do that.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the softness in the economy, have your boss's expectations about his demands on IT changed?
Let me substitute for information technology, technology R&D (research and development). Fundamentally, they are the same, although given everyone's emphasis on top-line growth right now, I'm getting a few more questions than usual about driving revenue.

Technology suppliers are especially eager to sell large companies such as yours all sorts of equipment and solutions. Do you believe large purchases of IT still guarantee better productivity?

Slideware?
There's a proposal to build something, but it really hasn't materialized.

Since some suppliers can only offer slideware, is there more pressure on Verizon to do the research and development to make these technological leaps?
It probably does increase the pressure on our R&D organizations to some extent, because (others) are doing slightly less. We operate in a food chain, right? You have component suppliers, systems-equipment suppliers; you've got us as the carriers, and you've got our customers and our customers' customers.

And things are obviously difficult?
Right now, the whole thing from a telecommunications perspective is in a funk. What we're trying to do is figure out when the economic recovery is basically going to help lift the entire food chain out of this. For example, our suppliers are a significant source of R&D for us because we work cooperatively with them all the time. If they're cutting back on certain areas of R&D and we see that that's necessary, then we have to pick up the slack.

Back to the return-on-investment issue for a minute. So your take is that technology adoption will lead to greater productivity?
I think I agree. History has borne us out. When we had our really terrific economic years of the 1990s and our productivity was up, I think one of the reasons productivity was up is we had so many technologically-based tools to help increase our efficiency. I can't remember when I didn't have voice mail, but I can't imagine not having it. So I think the adoption of technology is a huge factor in increasing productivity and ultimately contributing to the gross national product.

What's different about the buying cycle these days? Is it taking more time? Are you demanding more from suppliers?
The buying cycle is about the same...We're better at defining our requirements. We're better at explaining them to potential suppliers and our suppliers. More than ever, (suppliers) know how to interact with us. Our cycle times are about the same. (The suppliers) don't operate with quite the sense of urgency perhaps as they did in those very high-growth environments when you had to scramble every day to meet demand.

How much do you plan to spend on information technology over the course of the next 12 or 24 months, and is that more or less than last year?
I can talk about capital expenditures from a total perspective, which would be beyond IT and into all of what we call the "telecom group." And that will be somewhere between $9 billion and $10 billion this year.

How does that compare with last year?
It's slightly down from last year. Last year we spent about $17.4 billion, and our most recent guidance that came out with our first-quarter results indicates we'll now spend between $14 billion and $15 billion, and that's corporatewide.

Are there any projects that are not going to happen as a result?
A lot of what we're talking about here in the adjustment of our capital program is driven by demand, which is obviously down year over year. If there were to be recovery--we've all been hoping for a recovery in the second half of this year--that would be terrific. Then we could adjust that capital program to meet that demand growth. If it happens next year, of course, we'll be in a position to do that.

As you await the rebound, are there particular IT issues specific to your business that CIOs and CTOs at other companies don't face?
Let me give you one from the CTO's perspective that involves the CIO world. We're operating a network here of massive scale and geographic diversity as a result of the merger. For example, we've had operation-support environments that have had to be merged. This is similar to what banks have experienced in their mergers over the course of the last decade or so.

To follow that up, how would you measure success and failure as a CTO? What are some of the benchmarks you set for yourself?
The thing we look at is the impact of our technology, research and development on the business. It's very important that we not only define what the target architecture or what the target service package might look like, but how do we get there from where we are today, and how long will it take us to do that? So we have to really define the steps in between. Otherwise, we become disconnected from the business as a whole, and that would be a failure, in my estimation.

What is a sign of being "disconnected from business as a whole"? Is it offering an application no one wants? What's a good example?
I don't think you're going to avoid a dry spell every once in awhile. Lots of people in marketing or technology thought they had the silver bullet, and it turns out people just didn't want it. We have to accept a certain number of failures. But the important thing is you put things out there and give them a fair chance of succeeding. And, of course, as long as you have a reasonable ratio of success, then you're making an impact on the business, and I think you can consider that success.

Day in, day out, what's your immediate challenge?
It's a challenge to try and create from those different environments some sort of homogeneity, so you can get your arms around the operation in an economical manner and you can introduce new technologies as smoothly as possible.

With that in mind, what's the biggest technological challenge of maintaining one network while maintaining and building another?
We will have a variety of capabilities in the network. The voice and the data will become one on a converged network platform. We're managing the evolution. Right now, we have voice services largely on a traditional time division multiplex network with circuit switches that will migrate toward IP-based or packet telephony.

There's a variety of network capabilities all built on this single network infrastructure. That may mean you've got different kinds of switching and routing connected to that network, but we consider that landline network one and the same. It's really managing the evolution.

Verizon is a telecommunications provider. How big of a role do phones play in your push for greater productivity?
"Phones" to me is such a small subset; it's just a subset of the communications picture. When you start looking at the total picture--like the integration of data and telephony and multimedia and wireless and location independence and data over your wireless handset--it's really a combination of those kinds of things (that play a role in greater productivity).

Are you close to exploiting that convergence for more mainstream use?
It looks like we're potentially on the threshold of being able to capitalize on some of those capabilities. Whether it's just a data stream for high-speed connection to the corporate LAN (local area network) for telecommuters while they talk over the phone--all of this over a DSL and wire-line voice connection--or whether it's data over a 3G (third generation) wireless, or whether it's unified messaging, these things hold a lot of potential for increasing our efficiency and productivity.

What types of applications are you targeting?

What else will be important?
Web-based interfaces and call-management services and speech recognition in order to do call management--those kinds of things will be very important for us. The ability to take advantage of the distributed intelligence in the network--so that we can have a cooperative working relationship between smart CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) and network elements--and our ability to provide a secure environment for data transmissions would be just some of the areas we're concentrating on.

What is your biggest tech nightmare?
I don't want to turn this into a political statement, necessarily, but I would like to be clear that it would be difficult to capitalize fully on these technologies if we are burdened by historical regulation.

And then beyond that--because there's more than one nightmare out there, obviously--these kinds of technology introductions require broad-based changes in network operations and engineering and systems development and deployment. We just have a lot of moving parts in order to bring new technology to the network, and making sure that's all happening in a timely manner is something that does keep me awake at times.

What areas are you excited about or will you invest in over the next year?
Certainly, in the access network, the No. 1 priority is to make sure we have enough broadband capability out there. We're doing that with a variety of technologies. Many of them have been around for a while and haven't reached a cost-performance point that we're expecting they can reach in the near term: fiber to home, fiber to business, continued enhancement of DSL, broadband fixed wireless, and other ways we can provide a broadband-communications channel from a specific home or business into the network.

Are there others?
We'd also like to convert our core transport network to a fully fiber-optic one...Then there's packet telephony and, finally, an enriched suite of data services as we migrate from our existing time division multiplex network into a packet core.

What are three technologies that will matter or have an impact over the next year or two?
Obviously, there are the usual suspects in this regard. I'd have to start with voice over IP (VoIP)--I mean "packetized" telephony. This one's been around awhile. I think what we are seeing is VoIP moving up the technology life cycle curve and coming out of that emerging phase and moving into a more substantial deployment phase. It's always easier to introduce new technologies in high-growth environments, so it would be moving faster if the economy were there to give it a kick. But it's still proceeding.

We're still seeing a lot of technological innovation, a lot of progress. Certainly, the customer's interest hasn't waned at all. But I think the volumes of the deployments are down because of the economy.

What's your biggest disappointment with Web-based tech?
I don't know that I have a good answer for that question.

Security is becoming a crucial issue. Do you think cellular is easier to hack into or intercept than landline, or vice versa?
I never have tried to make that comparison. Let me talk about security in general. There are lots of dimensions to security, ranging from physical security for central offices all the way to cybersecurity for hacking Web sites and illegal data transmission interception. All of those security issues are on our radar screen.

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