About Alex

What’s your perspective on our company’s mission and vision?

Guavus’ mission is to deliver AI/ML-driven analytics to drive digital transformations at the largest communications service providers (CSPs). With a variety of advanced analytics use case, we enable our customers to analyze big data in real time, take decisive actions to lower costs and increase efficiencies, and find new sources of revenue – all with the scale and security required by next-gen 5G and IoT networks.

As part of the Thales group, our purpose is to harness the extraordinary power of technology to build a future we can all trust. Data is the oxygen of our modern societies, and our CSP customers enable this oxygen to move around. Guavus has a role to play with our data science and advanced analytics capabilities to help CSPs transform the ever-growing amounts of data into useful insights.

Tell us more about yourself (education, jobs, career, hobbies...)

I came to Guavus from within the Thales Group, more precisely from the Telecom business within Gemalto. Gemalto was acquired by Thales one year ago.

Before that, I was in charge of different technical and project management teams in smaller scale IT companies. Originally, I joined Gemalto to manage technical teams around the world before moving to the commercial side of the business, or the “dark side” as they say :).

Right before taking the lead role within Guavus, I was heading the Mobile Services & IoT business for Europe & Russia, as well as managing several global large accounts with a distributed team.

In terms of education, I have a strong technical background with a Bachelor and Master’s degree in applied math and physics. For the business part, at some point in my career I decided to fulfill one of my childhood dreams and went to study business at the University of Cambridge.

I have two little kids. Spending time with them on weekends or holidays is one of my main hobbies, as well as reading and listening to music. I play some guitar (but only when there’s no one around). As for sports, I cycle and play football. Finally, thanks to my 16-year experience of working in a French company, I really enjoy good wine.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your career? How did you overcome it and what did you learn from it?

There have been a few. One of the biggest challenges was when I first moved from managing a technical team to the commercial all-around management of the Gemalto telco regional business. It was a big move up, with plenty of new responsibilities in the area where I didn’t have much experience. For the first year, I mainly had to run on my intuition and common sense, while progressively replacing intuition with information.

In general, I normally analyze all the inputs I can get and then try to make reasonable decisions based on this analysis. There I relied on advice and listened a lot to different people to make the best decisions possible.

What I learned from this experience is that you just need to keep cool head, work hard and have a team around you that you can rely on. In the UK, they say “Keep calm and carry on”. I think that’s a very good approach. Whatever stressful the situation is and however high the pressure is, the only way to overcome it is to set a common target, and then work hard to achieve it (and encourage the ones around you to do the same).

What do you enjoy the most about the Telecom industry?

Several things: it’s innovative, on the cutting edge, highly flexible, fast-paced and growing.

I think today people working in the Telecom industry have a clear sense of purpose, especially during this COVID-19 crisis. CSPs are playing a critical role to serve subscribers and deliver connectivity in this time of need. They have a huge responsibility to keep societies and people connected. Being part of this industry and helping them remove roadblocks and keeping things running is very exciting.

What do you think are the biggest challenges CSPs will face in the next 5 years?

You could write a book about that! We could speak about programs of 5G network deployment or challenges of IoT growth, but I’d rather talk conceptually.

The exponential growth of data puts tremendous pressure on CSPs. They have to find the right technologies to process and analyze the large amounts of data all while delivering more and more services at a higher level of quality every day to meet subscriber expectations.

These demands represent more costs for the operators, so while they must lower their spending through automation, they also need to find revenue opportunities through data monetization.

Security is also a big challenge that, for a long time, has been underestimated. But obviously, the more people move into the virtual world, the more weight goes from their physical beings to their digital selves, the more potential damage can be done to people’s daily lives with security issues and fraud.

3 words to describe Guavus

Smart, real-time and fun.

Unexpected Fact:

I love long distance travels by car. My wife and I once had a three-week holiday and didn’t have any plans. We just got out of the house, looked at each other, got in our car, and then drove for 8,000 kilometers across 12 different European countries for the next three weeks. That was fun!