Two international telecom industry vets hired for key roles

Nigel Broomhall, Director of Service Delivery

Nigel Broomhall’s career in the telecommunications industry started in a product and technical support role for a specialist equipment manufacturer. There he provided first-line technical support to the 1,000+ UK users of its 3D mapping and modeling software and hardware, as well as ICT infrastructure. While there he discovered network-based voice products, including the early versions of Asterisk. Nigel used it to build a small inter-country voice network that was used internally.

Some years later as a VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) systems consultant, Nigel applied his experience to help grow the business technically as it ventured into the growing SIP and VoIP market. He helped formulate commercial strategies for revenue streams and develop business growth. 

This led Nigel into a solution specialist role, again applying his experience with IP voice and networking to build a hosted voice platform for the business and filling a gap in its customer product portfolio. This was followed by a move into the world of product management, where he specialised in VoIP, SIP, and unified communications (UC) services.

Earlier this year, as the UK was getting back on its feet following the worst of the Covid pandemic, Nigel joined NetSapiens, an established and highly successful American UCaaS platform provider. The company was expanding globally and looking for help to grow and develop its solution and service delivery into EMEA. 

“I found this a highly attractive proposition — to be involved with a business that had a product with a fantastic pedigree in its market, a great strategy, and where I could help grow and steer as the company started into a new territory,” said Nigel.

A fantastic challenge

As for what now lies ahead, Nigel continues, “It’s a fantastic challenge and one of great opportunity. The telecommunications industry is a turbulent one, with many changes on the horizon — not only in terms of technical innovation, but one where regulation and changes to the infrastructure bring their own set of challenges.”

Many established communications providers and transit carriers spend a great deal of time and money building on their infrastructure to ensure reliability, diverse routing, and resilience. However, further down the chain, many of the hosted voice service providers, and in turn their white label partners, seem to fall short in this area of diversification, usually partnering with just a single platform provider. 

“I see NetSapiens and our SNAP voice solutions helping to bridge this gap with our innovative pricing model that is not based on a per seat, per user, per feature model, but opens the door to a highly competitive consumption-based model — allowing service providers to have multiple platforms of their own, and allowing them to achieve greater profitability in what is a very competitive market.” 

“Another area of huge growth in the UK is the Alt-Net providers, and this is where a solution such as NetSapiens comes into its own, with its specialist residential features, and where its oversubscription billing model allows for high contention ratios,” concludes Nigel.

Aydin Yamalioglu, Head of Technical Pre-sales

Aydin Yamalioglu has been in the telecoms industry for 20+ years, “spanning a wide range of job roles and gathering a range of skills, starting on the tools, working with all types of cabling, using ladders, drills, etcetera, and doing site surveys for installations.”

“I specialised in the Samsung PBX range, reaching their network expert level accreditation,” said Aydin. “And I’ve worked on many key projects — some that involved having to have a wide spanning skill set and technical ability like combining SIP, microwave point to point links, network configuration including VLANs, and Layer 3 routing to get comms into the Olympic Park.”

Aydin assisted installing a brand new system into Samsung UK’s headquarters that was “way ahead of its time in its complexity and capabilities. I also ran my own communications business for 10 years with sales, engineer, and admin staff. I moved into the world of hosted PBX after realising that the days of traditional PBX were numbered.”

After working for a wholesale hosted company for a few years as head of their technical support department, Aydin says he learnt a huge amount about the hosted industry and what distributors, resellers, and, in turn, their customers’ frustrations were. “I always knew that hosted solutions lacked the feature set and flexibility of the traditional PBXs — especially in the early days.”

After researching what was available in the market, Aydin realised that many suppliers still seemed to always be lacking something. “These systems that were scalable had less features and the ones with features couldn’t scale. There were plenty that tried to span both, but then lacked reliability.”

Taking on the big players

Then Aydin came across NetSapiens. “In all fairness, I had never heard of it until asking around. The word was there was a business from America that was making plenty of noise and taking on the big players when it came to the hosted world. The more I looked into it and heard about NetSapiens the more I was intrigued. They almost seemed too good to be true. I had worked for and heard companies making claims of grandeur — yet after pulling back the curtain, falling very short of expectations so was trepidatious to say the least.”

After seeing the product and having “a good look under the bonnet,” Aydin realised “the noise” was valid. “I had finally found a company that knew what they were doing and I could see it becoming the market leader in the hosted market.”

Now, after being with NetSapiens for more than two months, Aydin’s confidence grows with each passing day that he’s in the place he should be and that the last 20 years of hard work and determination have paid off.

As Aydin says, the challenge in the industry today is to be able to offer a very high level of standards, including scalability, reliability, and a full feature set that needs to be on par with what the best PBXs offer. Aydin believes that a UCaaS platform needs to be something that can accommodate all ranges of solutions, from a small office to a multinational chain; from home workers to a head office call/contact centre; and even to an international world wide businesses looking to have a system that can span the globe. He says, “Netsapiens can offer all of the above with ease but not only that it can scale to the size of any opportunity.”

Within weeks of starting at NetSapiens, Aydin remembers that he was on a call with a potential customer who said they would like to initially “move more endpoints than some hosted providers see in a lifetime  over a vast range of handsets with lots of varied setups, all in the space of a few months. The fact that no one batted an eyelid gave me confidence I was in the right place.”

“Another key issue I’ve seen with so many solutions is not being able to give the wholesaler / distributor / reseller the ability to support the product fully. It can be done by providing the right tools, power, and education on what can easily resolve 99% of all issues. NetSapiens does this. Giving full visibility and having transparency is very enabling. There is no hidden dark art to this which secrets are only known by the in-house team,” states Aydin.

NetSapiens also gives resellers the ability to install confidence in their end customers. The resellers know what they are doing and have control over any issue that may arise, keeping relationships — some that have sometimes been built up over many years — intact and even enhanced. 

Aydin sums up the NetSapiens support strength, “The 1% of issues that cannot be resolved by resellers are handled by NetSapiens’ support team. They not only work together with the rest of the business to fill any knowledge gaps, but they also educate the NetSapiens community as well.”