Role: Board Observer

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Activities:  Advised Company on strategic and tactical matters including guidance on performance to plan and meeting of financial covenants.  Advised CEO on M&A activities.

Role: Chief Restructuring Officer, Board Member

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Activities:  Inserted as Chief Restructuring Offivcer  in fiber based CLEC that had badly missed plan. Replaced CEO and developed operating plan to reduce cash burn and position the company for sale.  Navigated the company through a financial restructuring that included reorganization through Examinership.  Successfully completed transaction in December 2009, preserving Eur26M of value for investors.

Role: Board Member, Chairman of the Board

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Activities:  Pageflex develops award-winning software technologies and applications for marketing and print automation. The company has led pioneering developments in the fields of VDP, web-to-print, business flow automation, and targeted multi-channel marketing technologies. Pageflex is a public company in the United States that trades under the symbol MGBH.OB

Role: Board Member

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Activities: Served as CEO of Eureka Networks and InfoHighway Communications ($120M annual revenues) since 2004 until sale to Broadview Networks in July 2007 for approximately $100M in cash and securities.   Served as Board Member of Broadview Networks from September 2007 till October 2012.

Role: Board Advisor

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Activities:  Advised management on setting strategic and tactical direction of firm; developed high level budget and operating plan; introduced company to strategic partners resulting in multi-million dollar revenue business.  Directed capital raising activities and interfaced with financing sources.  LIFE was sold in 2010 in a private all-cash transation with Sidera Networks.

Role: Advisor

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Activities:  Served as personal advisor to CEO of 4Connections in relation to sale to Cablevision Lightpath.  Participated in sale discussions with Cablevision, assisted in negotiation of terms of Stock Purchase Agreement.  Company was successfully acquired by Cablevision Lightpath in 2008.

I had the opportunity to visit the West Africa Cable System (WACS) cable landing station in Limbe, Cameroon.  The WACS is a 14,500km submarine fiber cable the stretches from South Africa to Portugal and onto the UK.  The WACS cable is a consortium cable, owned by about 15 telcos. Some African governments have also invested in the system via ownership of their national PTTs.  The cable is designed with a capacity of 5.12Tbit/s, although it is initially configured with a much lower bandwidth level, around 500Gbit/s (basically, the number of wavelengths that are initially “lit up”).  Readers who follow submarine cable systems should be aware of this important fact – that most people report only the “Design Capacity” of the cable, not the actual bandwidth utilizable at turn-up.  This means that the amount of sellable bandwidth is much less than the reported amount.  Nonetheless, the cables are built to be upgradable and advances in DWDM mean the possibility exists for the cables to go way beyond the initial Design capacity, to as high as 30Tbit/s.  (more…)