Hi Sheeja,

I am pleased to find your confirmation email regarding this interview. While

going through the business portfolio of your company I came to realize that
how you are competing with top tier majors vendors in terms product
features, diversity of applications and scalability.

We ZTE, as a vendor also provide same type of solution for our customers
(operators), our softswitch scalability and seamless migration to future
standards and applications, robustness in terms of MVI(multivendor
integration) standardized IOT (inter operatability testing) compliancy and well
suited support platforms such as O&M, NMS, EMS , OSS, BD (billing domain)
are directed in the same business line.

I went through the job description many times and also compared the
products that you are currently providing, I feel quite confident in offering my
technical consultancy, skills , expertise and experience in this area to take
your company’s brand name to another level in EU market.

Speaking of deployment and installation, my experience is quite diverse in

this field. Having an experience of several projects in this
ICT/Wireless/Telecom field, from which ZTE has leveraged their revenue to
the tier 1 vendors by applying industrial standard configuration, installation
and project management standards and best practices. Taking an example,
Such as if Broadsoft has landed on a contract deal to extend the current
NGN/IMS capability of specific operator to meet new BHCA requirement, how
they will justify the “cut over policy” (installing and extending systems
capability without taking it off line), “migration plan” (extending and
upgrading systems features and applications in live environment ) and
change management ( how new configurations will be applied with proper
back track documentation, plans and reports) and last but not the least MVI /
IOT (multi vendor integration and inter operatability tests) which starts from
QoS, specification compliancy, SoC (statement of Compliancy) follow up,
proposed feature compliancy, NMS integration and operatability tests, EMS
tests, Network congestion, jitter, packet loss tests, Reliablity of the system
test such as Hot standby fail over , MTTF, MTBF and several other complex
tasks. Most importantly all of this has to be performed under strict
management, schedule and completely monitored environment i.e in front of
customer’s engineers to sign the final acceptance tests.

I came across your product/projects ranking and several top tier installations
throughout the world, indeed I must say broadsoft has well recognized
reputation in VoIP industry and a bright future in terms of IMS capabilities and
total solution provisioning. Considering installations at UK environment which
would be mostly SMB midsized tight schedule projects and unsurprisingly a
one man show, I can totally picture the amount of pressure, work ethics, type
of tasks to perform in order to get the system up in earliest possible time.
Technically speaking, floor planning, network designing (in order to configure
VLAN over Cisco switches, defining subnets, configuring router for output
ports , configure pix firewall for NAT , VPN, VLAN to meet the best applicable
settings for the Voice service and its relevant protocols SIP/H323), then
server installation (if hot back up , or hot stand by ,1+1 , 1+n , n+m
redundant service configuration then installing High availibity HA software
over linux/solaris system , defining floating IPs, plugging relevant NICs,) then
finally testing dual plan LAN configuration with two or more switches /
routers/ firewalls for hot back up in terms of network failure (that could be
also configured for load balancing depending on the proposed architecture),
then finally installing broadworks app over the linux cluster/single node
through command line that would be compiling package(if binaries are not
given) installing, configuring linux for optimum usage (that is disabling
default services which are not required), installing any other O&M servers if
you have a separate entity for this (in our case it is). Installing CDR server
(for parsing, collecting re formatting CDRs prior to sending it to the
BD/OSS(billing domain) over FTP). Final task would be testing the
environment at commercial scale prior to provisioning.

As I mentioned before, these factors, procedures, entities are all dependent

on negotiated proposed system in the final proposal (on which the bidding
closed). Scalability, reliability , serviceability of the proposed system is
dependent on the CAPEX/budget scale of the operator(that varies from
hardware configuration from blade servers to HP proliant 1U rack mounted
units or DL580 servers). I have mentioned a little details to give you an over
view of my understanding of telecom/wireless projects in terms of total
project life cycle experience, moving from first hand RFI/RFQ/RFP response to
final proposal/SoC compilation then to installation, deployment, engineering
part, maintenance and training / demonstration.

I am also well versed in terms of customer service, I can deliver

training/demonstration in a lay man approach with jargon free language in
order to help/support them to grasp what they are actually responsible of i.e
O&M features, system provision, NMS operations, subscriber management
and accounting.

Going a little more in technical details here, I have notice that your solution
does not include Media gateway , billing domain, Online charging system
(OCS) and several other entities of required for carrier class deployment,
since being ignorant about much of commercial partnership understanding of
your business portfolio, I can only predict that you have compliant interfaces
with your technology partners providing billing solution, signaling gateways,
media gateways. Since if software is working in a commercial environment ,
would generate CDRs that needs to be parsed, analyzed prior to BD delivery,
or if it’s a prepaid NGN/IMS solution then softswitch / CSCF entities need to
have a DCC (diameter credit control request) protocol feature to interface
with the OCS.

Besides that I have total understanding of SIP/MEGACO/MGCP/H248/H323 for

voice and media gateway payload/signaling and QSIG/SIGTRAN/SS7 for TDM
circuits. In fact according to my understanding I totally believe that your
voice mail server, IVR, contact center are totally applicable in GSM/UMTS
network infrastructure, since your entities are IP based and if its integrated
mediagateway/signaling gateways it can perform such features (in our case
it’s a little difference we have different products for two solutions)

Coming back to the understanding of this job, I personally feel so excited to

work with such a well reputed brand name that has earned its fame and
proved its technology in a record time throughout the world. Indeed,
companies like ZTE/Huawei (Chinese vendors) picture your product
portfolio/features while designing their IMS/NGN systems because you have
mastered your sector and have well versed product line focused on every
scale of business sectors.

Fears of operators to be dependent for a the life time over a single vendors
have a given rise to multivendor integration compliancy, where many
challenges from the commercial aspects of the market are being faced, such
as vendors reluctant to disclose their technical specification of their
interfaces, causing a huge headache to new entrant in an already established
infrastructure of a given operator. Therefore, having skills, experience,
knowledge and nonetheless, contacts throughout the industry plays pivotal
role while integrating new solutions. In that aspect I hold ZTE, Huawei
product experience and well versed technical industrial contacts to shorten
the integration delivery time.

Our engineers (including me) has to work under high pressure due to the
eleventh hour delivery schedules and lack of proper technical installation
documentation, since each product has undergone continuous development
inside out (interfaces and internal implementation) so available technical
manuals lag behind in terms of updated features (which is a common practice
in all companies like NSN, Ericsson, Huawei). Therefore, being a part of
dynamic and aggressive industry one has to rely on his experience,
anticipation of new functionalities, features and changes. Especially in my
case, I also had to sometime write a whole installation/delivery manual after
completing the installation as each product is customized in terms of
commercial licensing, features availability and product requirements.
Therefore, on most of the occasions, there are just few technical
specifications (CLI arguments, folders to create, interfaces to open,
configuration) given by test engineers from R&D which will finally turn into a
whole manual specifically compiled for a given project. I have been in this
practice a lot and this gives me ability and understanding of technical
training delivery and product demonstration.

I believe in creativity and innovation are the main features of any position
regardless of its technological aspect, since telecom/wireless industrial
standards are aggressively changing at very rapid pace therefore, having a
specific appetite to learn new standards/technologies/process to comprehend
the challenges of business plays a vital role in a team. I am also a learner and
I believe in team spirit. I hope, this opportunity to have discussion with you
regarding this position would be fruitful at all levels. I am personally a sole
believer of individual efforts as well, therefore, if this goes well, you will be
proud of being my team manager for the service delivery at Broadsoft very
soon.

Enclosed are few documents for your reference, to understand my way of

work and we can further discussion about the details on the phone. Due to
information security policy and confidentiality documents may not include
major details. I am very interested in this position and looking forward for a
fruitful discussion regarding this opportunity.

Regards,

Zeeshan