Mukesh Bavisi
Managing director, Exponential-e Mukesh Bavisi, a member of the GTB 40 under 40 in 2010, is now managing director of Exponential-e. He has been instrumental in the company punching above its weight and in regularly taking complex business solution wins away from its competitors. Bavisi’s business insight, engineering knowhow and absolute focus on the customer has driven the company’s 30-40% growth for the last four consecutive years.
After pioneering UK VPLS, Bavisi is moving the company to a smart-wired cloud, uniquely combining intelligent networking with cloud bundles on-demand.
Ajay Chitkara
CEO of global data business, Bharti Airtel
As a driving force behind the huge growth of the data business at Bharti Airtel, Ajay Chitkara has been the catalyst to build a business from scratch to a $450 million operation today. He has also expanded it from a fledgling operation to a truly global enterprise.
With an impressive track record in developing and implementing business strategies, Chitkara is one of the youngest CEOs at Bharti Airtel and in the Indian telecom industry.
Chong Siew Loong
Head of network and systems, Nucleus Connect Chong Siew Loong is a very dedicated, detailed professional manager at Singapore’s carrier-neutral national broadband network, Nucleus Connect. Very much a forward thinker, he is strongly motivated to achieve on behalf of his employer.
Chong is a subject matter expert in many fields which he couples with a business awareness of how technology decisions impact on the company success. He embraces new technology easily with a maturity beyond his years.
A strong negotiator, he is highly respected by his peers and staff within Singapore and the wider Asia Pacific region.
Pieter de Villiers
CEO of Clickatell Pieter de Villiers is responsible for establishing the world’s leading mobile messaging provider.
De Villiers has led the company through a decade of robust growth and innovation by providing high value, application-to-person SMS services. With his leadership skills and knowledge, he has grown Clickatell’s global coverage immensely.
With his vision, knowledge and exceptional leadership skills De Villiers has successfully helped companies and organizations around the world provide better services to their clients while creating profits.
Julien Ducarroz
Chief commercial officer at Orange Julien Ducarroz, based in Romania, is a signficant player in France Telecom Orange’s emerging markets, Eastern Europe area. He fundamentally uplifted commercial success in Romania and had a wider impact on Orange’s success in the region. He has in-depth commercial expertise acquired within five Orange affiliates in developed and emerging markets, and is responsible for €1 billion turnover. His success is recognised across the group for mobile data, consumer voice and customer experience and he is one of the top leaders in France Telecom.
Reda El Mejjad
CEO, Monaco Telecom International Reda El Mejjad co-founded one of North Africa’s largest ISPs — with France Telecom Group — and was EVP of Wana, the largest fixed line and 3G provider in Morocco. Now CEO of Monaco Telecom International, part of Cable & Wireless Communications, El Mejjad has transformed its African business from local ISPs to Afinis Communications, a regional network service provider targeting Africa’s top 500 corporations. Afinis is targeting rapid growth over the next few years having already increased order value growth year on year since 2009.
John Finney
Chief commercial officer, O3b Networks John Finney has been one of the pioneers of O3b, one of the most exciting satellite start-ups of the past decade.
Over the past two years he has established a global sales and marketing function from scratch and has booked sales on every continent, bringing the contract backlog in excess of $500 million.
His customer-centric approach and people-oriented personality have allowed him to build relationships of trust with senior industry executives and key decision makers. Finney has been a key contributor to the early success of O3b and continues to help drive its progress.
Alex Franks
UK country manager at Blyk Alex Franks focuses on delivering business success. His strong sense of leadership and partner management has yielded rapid returns in positioning Orange Shots/Bright Stuff and Blyk Messaging at the forefront of European mobile advertising opportunities.
He is operationally strong, strategically aware and has a natural affinity to carry his team with him. Franks is an asset to a small but extraordinary company.
Mikhail Gerchuk
VP and chief commercial officer of MTS Mikhail Gerchuk holds the responsibility for the development and implementation of the Russian company’s marketing, sales and customer service strategies, as well as realization of overall revenue targets. Gerchuk was promoted to his current role in December 2008 and has developed the commercial and marketing initiatives that enabled MTS to increase market share and maintain growth, and has helped to implement the company’s strategy in the increasingly competitive Russian market.
Heather Kirksey
Director of product and technology strategy for Motive at Alcatel-Lucent Heather Kirksey has played a critical role, leading teams of technical experts from all over the world, in defining several key specifications relating to the management of devices in the home that have helped enormously to enable the phenomenal growth of broadband over the last five years. This work has included the world-adopted TR-O69 CPE WAN management protocol and many other areas including internet gateways and femto access.
Gavin Krugel
Director of mobile money at the GSM Association Gavin Krugel has been part of a number of the world’s most successful mobile financial service implementations, including Wizzit, MTN Banking, mTranZact, Simplus, and the GSMA’s Mobile Money Initiatives for a decade. He has helped develop, implement and drive several highly successful payment products globally. His knowledge, energy and enthusiasm for mobile money services are boundless and he is acknowledged as one of the leading experts and thought leaders in this space.
Mounir Ladki
General manager at Mycom Mounir Ladki has developed with passion and energy Mycom’s OSS business unit from a start-up with no customers to an industry leader with a world-class organization across three continents that transformed the OSS of major operators such as Vodafone and Telefónica O2. With his leadership Mycom delivered major global innovations such as the first commercial 3G/3G+ service assurance and the first convergent mobile/IP/fixed solution. An industry visionary in telecoms and IT, Ladki is shaping tomorrow’s network and service management solutions and practices in partnership with industry leaders such as Qualcomm and HP.
Bryan Littlefair
Global chief information security officer, Vodafone Security is vital to the new value-added services the industry is relying on to generate revenue growth. Hosting customer data and downloadable applications requires robust and responsive security. Bryan Littlefair is transforming Vodafone’s approach to IT security across the global organisation. He promotes a business focused and collaborative attitude to foster global cooperation. Littlefair builds on his career at MCI Worldcom and at BT where he was awarded two patents, to champion IT security as enabler.
Nikola Ljušev
CEO of Vip operator Nikola Ljusev joined Vip operator in Macedonia as CEO and CTO at age of 34, the youngest senior executive officer in Telekom Austria group. Despite difficult market environment and more than a decade entrance lag, Vip operator managed to achieve over 16% market share in only two years under his leadership. The growth strategy based on best value for money positioning and exclusive world class innovations, forced mobile incumbents to enter defensive strategy and invigorated competition. Thanks to his extensive knowledge of local market and regulatory environment, Vip operator continues to drive the market and challenges the traditional practices of incumbents’ businesses.
François Locoh-Donou
Senior VP, global products group at Ciena François Locoh-Donou has just been moved by Ciena to the US where he takes on a global role for the first time, after running the company’s Europe, Middle East and African operations, when he grew the business by 30% year-on-year, expanding it into 13 countries across the region and developing strong relationships with key decision makers. In the past year he has also integrated parts of the former Nortel’s business into Ciena.
Alastair Lukies
CEO of Monitise Alastair Lukies is co-founder of Monitise, the world’s first multi network, multi bank, mobile banking and payments service. He missed last year’s 40 under 40 conference because he was negotiating additional investment and alliances in the US. Since then Monitise has unveiled a new global platform and set up alliances in the US, India, Europe and elsewhere, and with Visa, the international card payment group.
Udit Mehrotra
Director and CMO of VNL; director of Shyam Networks In 2009 Udit Mehrotra was named Young Innovative Telecom Entrepreneur at the National Telecom Awards of India. This reflects his impressive list of achievements through which he has changed the market for retail and enterprise services in India.
Ubico Networks, founded by Mehrotra in 2007, is now the largest vendor of equipment for in-building and in-campus networks in India. Another venture, CityCom Networks, is India’s first independent intra-city carrier of carriers. He is also a director of the Shyam group and a director of VNL. which specializes in rural telephony.
Erwan Ménard
COO of DataDirect Networks This time last year Erwan Ménard was in charge of Hewlett-Packard’s global communications and media solutions operation, driving its core strategy to help service providers succeed in a market that is undergoing historic change. Now he is COO at DataDirect Networks, described as the world’s largest privately held information storage company, with the task of leading the scale-up of operations across the board, as the company keeps delivering aggressive growth.
Ménard has more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunications industry with permanent assignments in Asia, Europe and Americas, across different business models, all along the customer life cycle and with all-inclusive P&L management track record.
Rene Meza
Managing director of Airtel Kenya Rene Meza has done an outstanding job in the development of telecommunications in east Africa. He has led numerous game-changing initiatives in the category by driving growth through product quality, accessibility and affordability; simplifying product value, presentation and affordability to connect the unconnected.
He has a uniquely refreshing leadership style that recognises and inspires people to own and deliver. His achievements have been recognised through citations by industry experts and stakeholders in the region.
Giorgio Miano
VP for sales, EMEA, at Syniverse Technologies During his seven years at Syniverse, Giorgio Miano has used his extensive telecoms knowledge, helping the company expand its business in a number of different roles. Most recently, Miano’s expertise enabled Syniverse’s roaming line of business to deliver double-digit growth to the coverage and value-added services area he oversaw. In October 2010, Miano was appointed to his new role, based on his proven ability to provide strategy and direction to Syniverse’s tier one operator customers.
Norman Moyo
CEO of Zantel-Etisalat Norman Moyo has a strategic vision and a great understanding of the African market. In Nigeria, Moyo successfully developed and implemented a breakthrough segmented strategy aimed at young people and the rural population. Not only did these strategies succeed in terms of taking the lead in the youth segment, but he also developed a sustainable rural model able to overcome the challenging conditions in Nigeria — poor infrastructure, theft, no electricity — which at the same time provided support to the local community.
His work has been recognized and now Moyo is managing his operation in Tanzania with great success.
Upendra Poranki
Product owner for Yuave project at Nokia Siemens Networks
A mathematician and computer science graduate who is 29 in July 2011, Upendra Poranki had a brief stint in the oil industry before moving to telecoms and now works for NSN in Berlin in its Startups@NSN initiative — following a personal invitation by company CEO Rajeev Suri. He runs one of four products now being incubated at the unit, selected down from 200 entries. Yuave.com is being developed as “the Salesforce.com for telco applications”, according to Poranki.
Gauri Raizada
AVP of technology at Tata Teleservices Gauri Raizada’s most significant accomplishment is her ability to visualise and drive strategies into well executed programmes, keeping in mind the dynamics of the Indian telecom industry.
Her role as a technology lead led her — among other achievements — to roll-out a low-cost home-grown CRM that has now scaled to serve over 80 million subscribers and is tipped to be used by other operators as well.
She launched a self care service that reduced opex by $1.9 million.
Tarcisio Ribeiro
VP and GM for Europe, Middle East & Africa at Tellabs
Tarcisio Ribeiro, an electrical engineer and highly qualified marketer, has truly global experience. From North America, as Tellabs product manager for Verizon and SBC, he moved to Latin America where he doubled revenues, broke into the Columbia and Peru markets, and grew the Brazil market by 350%. Ribeiro is now driving new revenues in the EMEA region, taking Tellabs into high-growth markets including the Middle East, Russia and Africa.
Ryan Sher
COO of WIOCC As COO and former CTO of WIOCC, Ryan Sher possesses a rare combination of technical expertise and business acumen.
He has been a key force in implementing the EASSy submarine cable, a strategically important initiative which is for the first time bringing diverse, fibre-optic international connectivity to businesses and consumers across southern and eastern Africa. Sher’s drive, energy and inspirational leadership have been instrumental in the success of this landmark project — delivered early and within budget.
Dor Skuler
VP for cloud enablement at Alcatel-Lucent A former general manager of a Bell Labs Venture, in 2010 Dor Skuler was vice president in Alcatel-Lucent’s strategy and corporate development team, where he led the effort to identify disruptive innovation that could create significant financial opportunities for the company. One such area is cloud computing, where Skuler and the cross-company team defined a differentiated network- based strategy praised by carriers. Skuler is now leading the team responsible for delivering cloud-enablement.
Guy Sochovsky
CFO of MACH At Warburg Pincus, Guy Sochovsky managed the IPO of WNS Global Solutions, the acquisition of MACH and the sale of Loyalty Management Group to Aeroplan, demonstrating skills for corporate development and acceleration. Now a board member of MACH, Sochovsky has substantial finance and M&A experience, including leadership of major corporate development programmes, involving six acquisitions with an aggregate value of over $200 million.
Eylon Sorek
Director of marketing, Orckit-Corrigent Eylon Sorek is combining in-depth knowledge and experience in telecommunication marketing and technologies. In the past 10 years Sorek demonstrated excellent professional and personal skills at small, medium and large organizations such as Cisco and NSN. As marketing director at Orckit-Corrigent, Eylon has been able to introduce a new product line to the outbound environment and is expected to leverage his success in the telco industry.
Dennis Sverdlov
CEO of Yota Quite simply Dennis Sverlov is changing the face of the telecoms industry. Despite having no telecoms experience prior to founding Yota in May 2007, his work with the company has propelled Russia to the forefront of the development of 4G services.
Sverdlov’s vision of an open telecoms infrastructure has just led to a ground-breaking partnership with Russia’s four main telecoms operators that will see Yota roll out a nationwide LTE network covering 180 cities by 2014.
Rod Ullens
CEO and co-founder of Voxbone Voxbone CEO and co-founder Rod Ullens leads a rapid-growing innovator that is advancing IP communications and global connectivity. Ullens spearheaded creation of iNum numbers and has driven their evolution along with high-definition voice, presence, IM, and SMS support added; and non-VoIP carrier involvement building. Voxbone’s iNum and DID numbers let operators and enterprises quickly deploy new services and expand globally with local presence while reducing costs.
Hajo van Beijma
Director of Text to Change Hajo van Beijma is the co-founder of Text to Change, a mobile phone based service provider working on healthcare, education, agriculture and accountability in 14 countries in Africa and South-America. TTC has reached over 300,000 mobile phone users with mobile health quizzes, price information systems and mobile learning systems in emerging markets. Until now mobile telephony has never been used on such a large scale and systematic manner for this purpose. According to one report, there was a 35% increase in HIV testing in the regions where TTC ran its text message quizzes.
Walter Vicente
CFO of CSL Walter was instrumental in CSL’s business transformation in Hong Kong, culminating in the development of the company’s Next G network. Vicente is a key architect of CSL’s mobile broadband business model which ensures that the company is able to optimally combine growth and profitability objectives. He is well positioned to help drive CSL’s growth in Hong Kong while maintaining its leadership of the market.
John Wilkinson
VP at XConnect A VoIP innovator with 15 years international telecoms experience, John Wilkinson has led commercial operations for XConnect since June 2008 and has been instrumental in propelling IP interconnection, ENUM and NGN services. Wilkinson was pivotal in achieving the industry-first registry tie-up with GSMA PathFinder, launching the first Korean ENUM federation and securing XConnect’s Series B funding. Previously, with Interoute, he led development of Europe’s largest NGN (Arena) and Europe’s first Microsoft OCS-based unified communications suite.
Mohammed Zainalabedin,
General manager of Zain Bahrain Mohammed Zainalabedin’s effective leadership has helped Zain Bahrain to set technological standards, earning it a reputation as one of the most innovative mobile operators in the Middle East. He has raised the bar on customer service, earning the respect of its customer base.
As a HR focused manager, he has empowered Bahrainis to reach their full potential as employees, many of them moving on to senior roles in the Zain group.
He is known for his dynamism and his analytical approach. These key factors make him a well-rounded industry leader who helps to fulfil the aspirations of all stakeholders.