Platform Feature

TMCnet: What brought you to GCS?

Birdsall: There were several things that made GCS such a compelling opportunity. I saw a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace to allow carriers to accelerate margins through the GCS Dynamic Rating and Routing solution. The thought leadership and product set put them light years ahead of anyone else as far as bringing a meaningful value proposition to carriers. Everyone in our space is being asked to do more with less resources. GCS allowed carriers to answer that paradigm by automating all of the back office processes and accelerating margins on every call that traverses a carrier’s network. I saw huge opportunity to bring a very powerful solution to the marketplace and continue to enhance the NGN evolution that has clearly become the next step carriers need to take to remain competitive.

TMCnet: What is your role at GCS?

Birdsall: My main role is to drive revenue and increase market share within all of our verticals. A great part of my job, besides the people I work with, is that I am part of a team that solves very complex problems for carriers, both technically and commercially. The best part of my job, though, is introducing my customers to new opportunities. I sit in a unique position because we are a software company and I can be a neutral party to make introductions and help facilitate my customers’ growth and success.

TMCnet: Before GCS, you were at NexTone (News - Alert). How did that experience prepare you for GCS?

Birdsall: My time at NexTone was a phenomenal growth experience for me, both personally and professionally. It afforded me the opportunity to learn VoIP and NGN architectures, on a very granular basis. Our sales growth exploded as a result of an industry wide practice of capping TDM investment and growing into a “future-proofed” IP architecture. During that time I was able to learn the complexities, advantages, and new challenges that IP architectures created.  One of those challenges was routing. All of the NGN architectures were designed to be high transaction devices and manage sessions. They were not designed to handle the level of granularity in routing that carriers need to be successful and remain competitive. GCS solves that challenge through dynamic routing and allows those network elements to ably perform the tasks that they were designed to manage.

TMCnet: How have your other experiences in the carrier space prepared you for this field?

Birdsall: I began my career knocking on doors selling long distance for a regional CLEC in the New York City area in the early 90's, even before Al Gore invented the Internet. I spent several years managing sales teams on the retail side and eventually moved into wholesale space where I was running the Americas for REACH, which was a joint venture between Telstra and PCCW (News - Alert). At the time, REACH was the largest wholesale carrier in Asia and the eighth largest in the world. My interactions with all of these global PTT's and providers allowed me insight into what price compression had done to the market as a whole. I was fortunate enough to couple that with my retail/enterprise experience to have a true “bottoms up” view of the opportunities that could be realized by doing things differently. Having worked inside all of the components (retail, wholesale, hardware and software) gave me invaluable experience to relate to these challenges and bring a solution that not only meets these challenges, but accelerates margin and creates efficiencies.

TMCnet: What are some of your most proud moments?

Birdsall: I have been very fortunate to be a part of some great organizations in my career. GCS has afforded me the opportunity to help customers take that next big step in the NGN evolution. My happiness and sense of accomplishment comes when a customer shares with me that they have grown their margins substantially as a result of our solution. More importantly, not only have we saved headcount as a result of that additional margin, but actually enabled future growth for new products and opportunities. 

TMCnet: What can we all expect from GCS for the remainder of 2011?

Birdsall: 2011 is shaping up to be our best year ever, which after 2010 is really quite an achievement. You will see us add additional high profile customers due to the fact that we have a comprehensive end to end solution that works together natively. We will continue to build on our success and world class suite of products. Customers and prospects can continue to expect us to help them “do more with less”. Most importantly, we will continue to add features and functions to both our Dynamic Route Manager and Dynamic Rate Manager.