Top 25 High Tech Leaders in Dallas: J. Michael Turner, The

J. Michael Turner President, SBC DataComm

The Internet revolution will not be televised; it will be pumped into homes via broadband. And one of the key commanders in the uprising is Mike Turner, who led the charge for SBC's Project Pronto, a $6 billion investment across 13 states to build a broadband infrastructure for homes and businesses. "The industry's biggest challenge is execution," says Turner, who began his Southwestern Bell career 30 years ago. "There have been questions raised about customer service and quality of applications."

Turner now helms SBC's 1-year-old DataComm division, which specializes in networking services and integration. He has 6,000 employees throughout 36 states and Canada, including more than 700 Cisco-certified experts. "We'll be a core asset of SBC within five years, certainly," Turner predicts. In the past year, the company has opened two multi million-dollar data centers: one in Irvine, Calif., the other in Dallas. "They're more than 100,000 square feet, and they host Internet applications," he explains. "They're very much the communications hubs of the future."

Copyright D Magazine Jul 01, 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved