By Simon Woodhead
We’re delighted to welcome industry heavy-hitter Jared Smith to the Simwood team. He’ll be SVP of Product, joining our Senior Management Team on Monday July 6th.
Jared is an open-source veteran, formerly lead of the Fedora Project for Red Hat and currently the VP of Open Source at Sangoma, which sponsors and maintains the Asterisk and FreePBX projects. He also, quite literally, co-wrote the book on Asterisk. He’s an ubergeek, but one happy to jump on a stage to share knowledge or evangelise (some of you will know him from SimCon or other conferences).
He said, “I have always been impressed by Simwood’s forward-looking approach — whether on pricing, the design of their network, contributing back to open source, or their telecom APIs. I’m thrilled to be able to add my experience and expertise to the fantastic team at Simwood and to help continue that tradition of innovation and excellence.”
Simwood has changed significantly in the last few years, not just with the establishment of Simwood Inc in the USA, and not just the acquisitions of Sipcentric and Birchills Telecom in late 2019. We’ve also attracted serious customers and COVID-19 has brought with it big opportunities for us.
Charles Chance became Group CTO after the Sipcentric acquisition and has transformed our approach to technology. All together that is an awful lot of change, which some frankly haven’t kept pace with. That has created vacancies but also energised and inspired many of our more junior colleagues to want to grow. I can’t think of anyone better than Jared to fill immediate voids and develop those junior colleagues internally to have the skills we struggle to find in the market. He’ll also be acting as a bridge between development and customers, helping us bring services to you more quickly – we’re very good at innovating, less good producing sales collateral etc.!
Lastly, you know Simwood embraces and supports open-source. A number of our colleagues actively contribute to open-source projects and we support them as a company wherever we can. That will only grow with Jared and we’ve committed to our friends at Sangoma that we won’t see either Asterisk or FreePBX suffer through his departure.
We’re very excited to welcome Jared and we trust it’ll substantially help us serve you better.
