General Operations Manager
IPGate (www.ipgate.ae)
Total years of experience :23 years, 8 months
I joined IPGate (www.ipgate.ae) at the end of 2014 as a General Operations Manager with great intentions to turn the company in to one of the leading VoIP products distributors in the Middle East and since then, the company has successfully diversified and become one of the region largest distributors and master distributors for some of the brands. Duties: Starting up the business from scratch where this involved:
Strategic Planning:
- Develop strategic plans for IPGate, setting KPIs and budget planning.
- Driving operational improvements, maximizing the value of the asset base while ensuring a tight control on costs.
- Using RADAR methodology to identify the gaps and works toward filling it
- Has been the point of contact for top management and board members to translate the business goals into functional objectives and cascading this down in to individual objectives.
Monitor and setting annual plans for logistics systems, imports, exports, and delivery to customers.
In house Operations:
- Responsible for monitoring and continually improving standards of performance and quality within the operations.
- Managing information up and down with in a diverse and geographically distributed organization.
- Drive initiatives in the management team and organizationally that contribute to long-term operational excellence. Formulate and implement departmental and organizational policies and procedures to maximize output
- Hire the right staff, train, coach and guide to be able to meet business needs either in house or outsourced.
- Was responsible to manage all the projects and guide the team on their projects goals and timelines.
- Review financial statements and data and utilize financial data to improve profitability.
- Manage and control operational budgets and planning effective strategies for the financial wellbeing of
- Manage and Monitor IT infrastructure and IT training needs to support the business.
Outsourced environment:
- Setting the SLAs for the outsourced teams identifying the scope of service, deliverables and timelines.
- Managing the outsourced team ensuring the quality of delivery and cost effectiveness.
- Continuous evaluation for replacing the outsourced team with an in-house service.
Vendors and suppliers relationship management:
- Selection of vendors based on the vision of the company, business trend, quality of product and compatibility.
- Maintaining the Portfolio of products and re-evaluation of vendors and suppliers.
- Managed relationship with Vendors and Suppliers locally and internationally.
- Negotiating with vendors and suppliers to expand the benefits.
Impact:
- Successfully established a well-recognized IT services provider company in the MENA region.
- Increased products’ portfolio to meet channels and market needs.
- Increased the profitability and the company gross rate to exceed 12 %.
I joined Sitec at the start of 2012 as a General Operations Manager with great intensions to turn the company in to one of the leading Unified Communications and VoIP products distributors in the Middle East and since then, the company has successfully diversified and become one of the region largest distributors and master distributors for some of the brands.
Duties:
- Develop strategic plans for operational activity and driving operational improvements, maximizing the value of the asset base while ensuring a tight control on operational costs.
- Responsible for monitoring and continually improving standards of performance and quality within the operations.
- Managing information up and down with in a diverse and geographically distributed organization
- Drive initiatives in the management team and organizationally that contribute to long-term operational excellence. Formulate and implement departmental and organizational policies and procedures to maximize output
- Monitor, manage and improve the efficiency of various departments in the organization as Sales, Marketing, IT, Finance, HR, procurement and logistics.
- Review financial statements and data and utilize financial data to improve profitability.
- Manage and control operational budgets and planning effective strategies for the financial wellbeing of the company and Monitoring cash flow.
- Establish organizational structures to guide HR manager through organizing recruitment and placement of required staff.
- Establish work schedules and delegate tasks and accountabilities across head of departments.
- Setting and planning annual sales targets.
- Plan and support annual marketing activities.
- Plan business structure and growth.
- Plan and manage the expansion of products portfolio.
- Plan and manage the channels and distributions focusing on unified communications and telephony business.
- Monitor and Manage products procurement.
- Monitor and manage relationship with suppliers across countries.
- Manage and Monitor IT infrastructure and IT training needs to support the business.
- Monitor and setting annual plans for logistics systems, imports, exports, and delivery to customers.
- Setting and monitoring KPIs for the organization and team.
Impact:
- Provided management for successful distribution through channels partners that includes AED 25 M, unified communication and telephony products.
- Brought increased credibility to the company that had consisted mainly of acquiring new products to present its self-confidently as a master distributor in the Middle East.
- Increased products’ portfolio up to 15 products to meet channels and market needs.
- Travelled to all partners in GCC to support management and crews allowing company to maintain good relation with the channel and be closer to all market inputs on ground.
- Increased the profitability and the company gross rate to exceed 12 % with tangent expansion from operating only from one site to operating from four sites to cover all the GCC.
TECHNICAL AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Unified Communications / IP PBX-Telephony solutions
- Session border controller (SBC) and SBA devices (Sonus, Ferrari and Sangoma)
- Front end, EDGE, reverse proxy and mediation server.
- Microsoft Unified Messaging Network Topology.
- SIP trucking and Direct SIP for Lync.
- Redundancy and pool deployment.
- Real-time and non-real-time communication.
- Call center, Call recording, Billing, Fax and IVR solutions.
- Open source telephony solutions (Asterisk - Digium, Freeswitch, Yate).
- IP phones (Cisco, Polycom, Snom, Yealink, HP)
Networking
- Managed switches and routers devices (Cisco, HP, Draytek).
- Design network layout based on high availability cluster (HA).
- Microsoft windows server ( managing security, managing primary, secondary and backup domain servers, Managing users and groups, Managing disk space and device sharing and security).
- VMware, Network-attached storage (NAS).
DVCOM Technology is an established Open Source VoIP Telephony and Networking solutions company. Established in 2007, DVCOM is the technology arm of Al Mashka Group, a UAE based $150 million conglomerate.
Duties:
- Manage staff, including hiring, training, evaluation, guidance, discipline and discharge.
- Develop the IT staff to meet the changing needs of users, groups and offices; new projects and technologies.
- Develop standard operating procedures and best practices, including providing written protocols and guidance to IT staff and to end-users.
- Ensure the creation and maintenance of all written documentation, including system and user manuals, license agreements, and documentation of modifications and upgrades.
- Oversee provision of end-user services, including help desk and technical support services.
Keep current with the latest technologies and determine what new technology solutions and implementations will meet business and system requirements.
- Manage financial aspects of the IT Division, including purchasing, budgeting, and budget review.
Develop and implement all IT policies and procedures, including those for architecture, security, disaster recovery, standards, purchasing, and service provision.
- Manage the deployment, monitoring, maintenance, development, upgrade, and support of all IT Infrastructure, including servers, PCs, operating systems, telephones, software applications, and peripherals.
- Provide expertise and support during systems upgrades, installations, conversions and file maintenance.
- Oversee systems development and enhancement and the integration of new systems with existing systems.
- Work closely with staff to develop strategies and plans to enhance client services, improve user effectiveness, and foster innovation.
- Communicate regularly with executive management and all users of information services and systems.
- Manage telecommunications infrastructure and development plans, projects, policies and procedures.
- Negotiate and administer vendor, outsourcer, and consultant contracts and service agreements.
- Support the company’s overall mission and follow all standards, policies, procedures, and confidentiality guidelines.
Impact:
- Provided management for successful distribution through channels’ partners that includes from AED 5 M to AED 18 M, unified communication and telephony products.
- Increased profitability by adding products to the portfolio, setting aggressive annual sales target and monitoring the actual performance against the plan on monthly bases, directing the team to achieve the pre-set target.
- Improved output standard, reduced rework and increased our partners’ satisfaction by simply introducing quality management system and close monitoring for all operations to ensure the standards are applied.
MobileWare Founded in 2001 and currently provides mobile device (PDA) software and consulting services of various technologies and to improve their productivity. In addition, to being market leaders with our experience in the development, implementation and support for innovative business systems designs, MobileWare employs the best industry-standard practices and works closely in preferred partnerships with its major global partners.
Duties:
- Plan, direct, or coordinate the development, implementation, deployment and operation of information technology systems and technology solutions and software for business needs. Plan, direct and coordinate daily activities of IT function, long term IT strategies and strategic needs of the company from IT perspective to bring just in time efficient and effective solutions within agreed time frame and budget.
- Analyze current and future technological requirements for the business, conduct comparative effective and efficient analyses to evaluate proposals to assess project feasibility and requirements. Develop and maintain technology policies, standards and procedures manual. Develop and implement service level agreements
- Manage the performance of the team, guide, coach and develop them
- Ensure that the databases are implemented, managed and maintained
- Manage network operations to include; troubleshooting connectivity problems, installing and maintaining routers, managing users, backups and reporting operational status etc. and ensuring that they are properly functioning.
- Meet with department heads, managers, supervisors, vendors, and others, to solicit cooperation and resolve problems and assist their technology needs
- Manage backup, security and user help systems.
- Prepare, maintain and manage a technology disaster recovery plan
- Prepare the annual operation plan for IT and IT budget in line with the business requirements and manage the budget to meet the business needs.
- Manage day-to-day operational aspects of projects and its scope.
- Resolve escalated day to day users’ and customers issues.
- Effectively review and communicate projects progress, prepare appropriate periodic progress reports as needed by management team.
Impact:
- Improved the overall performance of the team and the management of information operations.
- Improved the overall customers’ satisfaction through committing to the projects’ completion deadlines and quality of output.
- Restructured the operations, introducing progress and cost tracking procedures, hiring new staff, reviewing all suppliers’ contract terms and justifying time/ payment extensions.
- Enabled company to reduce the risk on projects by conducting contracts assessments and providing advice on potential downfalls.
Horizon Provide solutions in hardware and software in domestic and corporate sectors. Provide products in networking solutions, software solutions and supported them through dedication and devotion, with commitment to create world class enterprise solutions and networks
Duties:
- Ensure that all the technical support processes are continuously developed and improved
- Develop and maintain controls and procedures to ensure that the technical support processes are efficiently running
- Diagnosis of technical problems that cannot be resolved elsewhere and come up with permanent solutions
- Provision of technical advice and guidance for all other areas
- Handle the problem management process and make sure that there is permanent fix to all workaround that been previously applied
- Be responsible about the coordination with technical support vendors by reporting the problems and communicating the required details for diagnosis and resolution
- Build and develop new ways to increase productivity of support staff and reduce resolution time.
- Monitor the maintain datacenter equipment (Servers, Network...etc.), by applying proactive approaches and suggestion to fix up potential problem that may occur.
- Optimize the availability of the ICT Infrastructure by delivering cost effective improvements that show tangible benefits to the business and user
- Achieve over a period of time a reduction in the frequency and duration of incident that impact on ICT Services.
- Report to IT manager the progress on all infrastructure projects and highlight the potential infrastructure threads.
Impact:
- Optimized cost effective solutions for all infrastructure.
- Implemented centrally managed end point security solution.
- Implemented a centralized monitoring system and event management for all business critical servers and network devices.
- Upgraded the entire core IT infra-structure in all business units, ensuring that all systems across the company will follow a standard infrastructure model aligned with industry best practices.
- Implemented a technical refresh for all endpoints across the group implementing a standard infrastructure model and best practices.
Project Management Professional certification working on it and the estimated date to finish it is on May 2011
Digium Certified Asterisk Professional Certification for administration of Asterisk (VoIP) was the first one in Middle East who was able to get this certification