IT industry veteran David Meintjes has been appointed as managing director of Connection Telecom, a provider of carrier-grade open platform IP PBX solutions.
The Broll Property Group has also taken a stake in the company.
This, Connection Telecom says in a statement, is to position the company so it can take on the big traditional PBX proprietary suppliers, while offering property tenants a full telecommunications service as part of their utility packages.
Meintjes will now serve with Jonathan Broll and Alan Wallace, founders of Broll Property, who have been appointed non-executive directors. Jaap du Toit, executive director of financial services company PSG Group, will be Connection Telecom's new chairman.
“The restructuring will take Connection Telecom - highly regarded for the advanced open standards PBX solution it has brought to the small and medium corporate market for the past six years - into the major league of business telephony providers, while still staying true to its open standards, open platform and open source roots,” Connection Telecom says.
Looking forward
“Our goal is clear: to build our share of the South African enterprise PBX market to mirror the international benchmark for the uptake of open platform IP PBX technology, currently around 18%,” notes Meintjes.
He says businesses are becoming less tolerant of proprietary solutions that lock them into a vendor. IP PBXs built on an open platform largely reduce the need for capital expenditure and can deliver operating cost savings of as much as 40%.
Meintjes took on the role of chairman of Connection Telecom in 2007, guiding the long-term strategy for growth. He is the former chief executive of UUNET SA, which eventually became Verizon and was merged with MTN Business.
Steve Davies and Rob Lith founded Connection Telecom in 2004. They are pioneers of IP telephony in SA, and have developed a reputation for being experts in the open source software technology powering modern IP PBXs.
Davies has made major contributions to the kernel development of the Asterisk platform, widely regarded as the pre-eminent open source IP PBX system.
Much of their work over the last few years has involved additional development of the core call switching and management engine, and integrating other advanced technologies to create the enterprise-class Telviva platform, which is now being taken to market.
“The appointment of the new directors, industry leaders in the property and financial services sectors, is a solid endorsement of the strategy we have laid out,” says Meintjes. “Both Jonathan and Alan share Connection Telecom's long-term view of IP PBX as infrastructure as a service.”
Meintjes says when a tenant walks into a property, they expect the water to flow and the lights to burn. The same is becoming true of business telephone services, and the Broll Group sees a future where it can provide tenants with an advanced, managed system at reasonable cost by using a multi-tenant or hosted IP PBX.
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