• Azhar Sayeed has been one of the key figures in cloud-native telco developments
• He spent more than eight years at Red Hat and even longer at Cisco
• Now he has joined European cloud-native IMS core platform developer ng-voice as its CTO

Azhar Sayeed has left Red Hat to join European cloud-native IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) core platform specialist ng-voice as its CTO. 

Sayeed, a regular contributor to TelecomTV discussions and a member of our DSP Leaders Council, was until recently senior director of TME Technology & Strategy at Red Hat, where he spent more than eight and a half years: Prior to that he spent 17 years at Cisco. 

Now, though, he is heading up a team that aims to help telcos cut the cost of running their virtualised voice core systems and help find ways to develop new applications and services based on the multiple capabilities of a cloud-native IMS platform. 

Hamburg, Germany-based ng-voice has been around for more than 10 years and initially, under founder Carsten Bock, was a small team developing IMS functions for other companies. But in 2019, Bock joined forces with former McKinsey executive David Bachmann, the company’s CEO, to scale it up and attract external investment and broader industry support. Soon after that the company scored investment from Landsdowne Partners. Bachmann says individual telecom sector veterans have also been brought on board as advisors and minor investors but declined to say how much the company has raised in external investment (though one online report suggests it is around €20m). 

Now, Bachmann tells TelecomTV, the company has about 70 staff, 15 deployments across its four main target markets (mobile network operators, MVNOs, IoT infrastructure players and private 4G/5G network operators), with Telus being its key customer reference: The vendor announced its engagement with the Canadian operator and hyperscaler AWS earlier this year.  

Bachmann says ng-voice has also struck a deal with a large European Tier 1 telco and an operator in South Africa, though they cannot currently be named, and the company is hungry for more. According to the CEO, while the use of voice services is on the decline, they are going to be used, and therefore need to be provisioned, for some time yet, and the deployment of ng-voice’s cloud-native technology allows a service provider to reduce the production cost of its voice platform by between 50% and 80% compared with traditional IMS platforms. 

As telcos shift towards cloud-native deployments, the deployment of a cloud-native IMS core becomes more attractive to help deliver voice services in the most efficient way. While the German minnow faces very stiff competition in the form of Ericsson, Huawei, Mavenir and Nokia in the voice core platform sector, “many others have stopped investing in their voice and IMS” technology. However ng-voice is “investing further to stay ahead with our fully automated cloud-native IMS that allows customers to run IMS at scale and also to develop new revenue-generating services on top of the IMS,” such as applications to prevent spam-calling, claims the CEO. 

That’s fighting talk, as you’d expect from a challenger coming up against industry heavyweights, but how does a company such as ng-voice get its foot in the door at more telcos? 

That’s where Syeed comes in, taking on the CTO role, a move that allows founder Bock, who has been chief technology and innovation officer, to focus on the innovation side of that particular job coin. 

Syeed will help with the company’s plans to upscale its go-to-market and product delivery approach and “capture this opportunity in the IMS market… he has the  experience required to further scale ng-voice with the many years in his Red Hat role,” stated Bachmann. “He’s going to be super valuable for us when it comes to scaling the product portfolio, when it comes to pushing innovation and scaling our whole engineering team. And given his experience, he's going to be a fantastic partner for our clients on their cloudification and containerisation journey, and he’s going to help us to make sure we stay ahead of the cloud-native and automation curve. What is also very important to me is that he’s a fantastic human being and a great colleague to be adding to our team. He has known us already for years,and we know him from our partnership with Red Hat. So both sides know what they’re signing up for!”

Azhar has already joined the company and will be helping to set up operations in the US to go with the company’s existing offices in Hamburg, Mexico City, Dubai, Singapore/Kuala Lumpur and Melbourne. 

“I am super excited to be part of the ng-voice leadership team,” Sayeed told TelecomTV. “Before I accepted this offer, I evaluated ng-voice on several fronts – which market they were addressing, the problems they were solving, customer and partner feedback, the leadership team, the advisors and the [investors]... In all aspects they scored very high in my assessment, hence I am here now.

“ng-voice has built a truly Kubernetes-based cloud-native product that I was advocating for a long time while at Red Hat. They have taken everything Red Hat has been preaching and implemented it. It is a highly elastic, stateless software stack that can be deployed on any cloud platform with minor changes. They are addressing the VoLTE/VoNR [voice over 4G/5G] market where the penetration of VoLTE capability globally is very low,” he continued. “Additionally, voice is being embedded into so many new services, from gaming to IoT devices and from fixed wireless access to voice-over-cable for fixed line voice. With the addition of AI-based tooling, the potential to provide rich media communications to all devices is huge,” stated Sayeed. 

He added: “ng-voice has managed to garner a fantastic board of advisors and build a great leadership team with David [Bachmann] at its helm. I have now met the engineering and product teams and I am impressed at what they have been able to achieve so far. My role, as a CTO, is to continue to build and scale that product for Tier 1 telco consumption. I will also be looking to build the portfolio further to address market requirements and lower the barriers to deployment through automation and AIOps,” he concluded. 

So, an exciting time for Sayeed and ng-voice: Let’s see if it’s a combination that can lead to a new chapter for cloud-native IMS development in telco core platforms. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV