Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Welcome to DiDX podcast video and audio channel where we bring you in touch with technology leaders from around the world. I’m your host Alli Hassen and today we have Sergio Fogel, the CEO of Uniotel, headquartered in Montivideo, Uruguay.

He is quite a well-known name in the VoIP Industry. Glad to have you with us, Sergio.

Sergio Fogel: Thanks for having me.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Sergio, you’re CEO of Unitel and we’ve been reading about your

company quite a lot. It has a lot of presence on the internet. Tell us about yourself, tell us about your background. What led you to become an entrepreneur? Tell us about your career before becoming an entrepreneur.

Sergio Fogel: Okay, it’s a long story, which speaks a lot about my age.  I grew up here in Uruguay, then I went out to study Technology in Israel. There I studied computer science, earning my master’s degree. Later I went to work for IBM and did work related to semi-conductors. After that I decided I wanted to enter the business world so I went for my MBA and studied in France.  After that, I’ve been out of my home country for ten years. Now I thought it’s time to get back. I’m excited also that it’s possible to do some technology stuff from outside the Arab countries.

So I came back home. At first I worked in a corporate environment for an Oracle corporation. Then in the year 2000 after the first big dot-com boom, I decided it was the right time for me to start as an entrepreneur. I founded my first Internet company. It was called (Algobora?). It was not successful. In retrospect it’s easy to know why but at the time it was much harder to realize.

Just to tell you what happened, we got into the business to business market place and it was really too early. Many times we as entrepreneurs feel we are late into a market and that market wasn’t there at the time. So in the year 2001, I founded a company together with my partner, a company called Uniotel which is a voice over IP provider, a service provider. We got quite large, and then in one point we were selling voice over IP devices like Cisco ATAs, which were the most popular at the time. Then we started to see that one of the main driving reasons for people buying the ATA’s was that could have a phone number in a place other than where they were located physically.

So for instance many people inside finance want to have numbers in Manhattan. Many people wanted to have numbers in London. Here in Uruguay were a large supporter of their software. Some companies wanted to have a number for customer support in Mexico, the UK, Spain, in the US and so we find that people were buying the devices which were very complicated to deploy at the time. They were buying the devices not because they needed the device but because they wanted to test and use the number.

Maybe it’s not so important to sell the device and having all the complexities of installing and have a device which warrants our support. We were getting calls from people, you know when you’re living with these devices, it gets tough to manage support. People are calling us and saying the device doesn’t work, and so the first question was “Take a look at the device and see if the lights are on.” And many times they weren’t, the device was unplugged. Which sounds trivial, but it isn’t. Sometimes the device was located in a difficult to reach place like data center or something like that.

So we said, “Let’s provide a product that’s 100% sold as a service and doesn’t have anything else with it.”

So we decided to launch the product, but we found that launching a new service is, especially an Internet service within a company can be quite difficult. People have other priorities and you’re all the time dealing with the urgent stuff and who has time for the new stuff?

So at the time we got on board a partner to launch this. A guy called Andres  which was instrumental in the product launch. So he worked very well, we pushed very hard to launch in time. We had a team of designers and programmers, programmers for the telephony part and so on. So that’s essentially how our current company started and how we made it to here. We are talking 2006. We didn’t have very many suppliers. It was difficult getting a supply of phone numbers, but we managed and after that suppliers came up and it became much easier.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: From IBM to semi-conductors to an MBA to Oracle and Alagora, you do have quite a story. I’m sure many people in the world would yearn for such exposure. Every entrepreneur faces challenges, which challenges did you overcome to start your own business?

Sergio Fogel: Well, I think for almost every entrepreneur, the main challenge is you want your organization and your suppliers and your services providers to move at a different pace than what they are used to. I want to get my website up and working by tomorrow. It makes it very tough for the organizations to keep pace and sometimes it’s very frustrating because you have all the resources but people just don’t move at the same speed. I’ll say that’s the main issue.

The other thing is you’re very anxious to launch things, you want to get things on the market but on the other side if you don’t go through the processes together with the product, you will suffer early withdrawal. So for instance if you launch and don’t have the support processes, you don’t have the program, the billing systems, it’s going to be a pain in the neck later on.

On the other side you have all the anxieties of both the launch and you feel all the time that there are other competitors coming up against you and that’s really tough to manage. Having the process in place before, that’s the critical part, you really must have this in place sooner than later.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor:.  Sergio, Uniotel is quite well-known in the world of our industry of telecommunications, everyone already knows about it but if I was to ask you how you would describe your company, your products and your services, what would you say? Just tell us about your company in your own unique way.

Sergio Fogel: We provide (virtual) phone numbers from other countries that we have interconnected with, not many countries have regulations regarding them, some do. So for any company that wants to have a future presence in a country other than their own, they can buy phone numbers from us to make that happen.

I think I’d choose how they want to receive the calls. They can receive the calls on their current regular phone land line, they can receive the calls on a mobile phone, they can receive the calls over Asterisk PBX in a voice over IP device or make it ring on their http://www.Skype.com ID. Essentially, we allow companies to have a virtual presence in a different part.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: So are you only providing virtual phone numbers to companies and not individuals?

Sergio Fogel: We also provide this service to individuals, but our main target is small companies and people who would use phone numbers for work. That’s our main target, we do have individuals who use it but most of our customers are small to large businesses and large. Many call centers use our service.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: So Sergio, since you’ve opened up a business outside the USA in Uruguay, does the Uruguayan government give incentives to small businesses?

Sergio Fogel: Well actually we’re just a USA corporation, we do have operations in Uruguay, but technically we are a US company. We do banking in the US, and we have our both of our main suppliers in the US. In today’s world with the internet, you can have your company in one place and your employees in another. But to answer your question, yes the Uruguayan government does provide lots of incentives. Right now we’re not using those.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Sergio, what areas in the world seem to be the most popular to have a phone number from? And why?

Sergio Fogel: Well the most popular is the USA. It may have to do with the fact of the language issue. We are in the process of translating the website into other languages, but right now we only have it in three languages, and of course the USA is such an important economy. The USA is a place people want to have a virtual presence in. The second one is Europe, and we are seeing the rise of China more and more and some other emerging markets such as Brazil, Mexico, and places in South Asia as well, South East Asia especially.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: So Sergio we’ve seen quite a lot of examples, quite a lot of inspiring examples of people using voice over phone numbers.

There have been foreign exchange students going out of the country and buying voice over phone numbers so that their parents can call them easily.

There have been companies that have shifted their operations off-shore to save costs.

Tell us a unique story that you’ve come across with virtual phone numbers that shows a very unique use of a voice phone number?

Sergio Fogel: I think the prize for that goes to a Russian girl that wanted to, she wanted to marry an American guy, so she wanted to have a US phone number essentially as an aid to marry an American person. She was one of our first customers, and she was successful. She did marry some American guy. So unfortunately we don’t have her as a customer anymore but she did find her goal.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Wow, VoIP and matrimony that is really interesting (chuckles), yes. So which part of the VoIP industry do you see booming in the next five years? Would it be either call forwarding, fax, VPS? Which areas do you see to be at the highest levels, at the big levels in the next five years?

Sergio Fogel: We are very excited about mobile Voice over IP, and people are having today a soft phone on their iPhones and on their Symbian phones. They can use Skype or Fring on the iPhone. We launched a new service, it’s a separate VoIP-based service. It’s called FreetoSkype with Jetnumbers, which is very exciting. It’s  a free service, and instead of providing a phone number, we give you an extension inside a phone number. That’s what allows us to provide the service for free.

Since the phone numbers do have some costs, if we can share our phone numbers between, say hundreds of users. That’s going to be a very popular service. We have many thousands of users and we see that people are using that and their taking the calls on their Skype, their mobile Skype.

The other area we’re see more and more movement, as people become more and more confident with technology, they’re starting to use Skype, virtual phone numbers and IP telephony for mission critical services. We have many call centers that are using it for really critical applications.

For instance we have a customer who is an airline and they’re using our service for two different services. One is for reservations which is mission critical for them and the other line that they have is very special. They have a phone line for emergencies in case they were to have an accident, they need to have a phone line to call and have some information. We are providing numbers for that. Very very mission critical and it would of been unthinkable* five years ago, but today people do trust the technologies, they understand it can be relied upon for mission critical needs now.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Yes, that is the one of the greatest things about Voice over IP, that it is changing the world and making the world a better place. So Sergio, what’s next for the company?

Sergio Fogel: That’s a tough question, we keep growing, we don’t want to diversify too much, because we want stay very focused. So our idea is to keep improving the service, we want to provide some new features and many people want to have re-route where their phone numbers ring to according to the time of the day of the week or the hour of the dday. We want to integrate with the CRM Systems. But essentially we see that there’s more features for the same main products. We want to stay very focused and on the course, we believe we’re on the right course.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: So Sergio, what would you suggest for all those aspiring to be entrepreneurs in the telecom industry, and advice in particular?

Sergio Fogel: Well I always give the same advice, which is that it’s better to launch first and organize later. It happened to me many times that we we worked a lot to get the perfect product on the market, and sometimes we found out that there is not too much demand for the product, but it’s better to find out after you’ve spent a limited amount of resources and not after you’ve spent a whole year and lots of money on the product.**

So I always prefer to start with a smaller launch. Test the market, see if there’s a real demand and then there’s always the time to re-organize later. Which can be quite a lot of work afterwards. I do prefer this to the other approach.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: I’m sure it’s sound advice, coming from an experienced person just like you. Anyone just now tuning in, this is the DiDx broadcast channel with your host Ali Hassan, and with our guest Sergio Fogel, the CEO of Uniotel. We’ll post this on the DIDX podcast channel and on iTunes’ IP communications channel. Sergio we do thank you for your interview.

Sergio Fogel: Okay, thank you very much for having me.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: So Sergio, wait one more topic! Tell me about Uruguay, your country.

Sergio Fogel: Uruguay is very different than what people believe. It’s very European. It’s a small country, very stable. We’ve had democracy for something like 30 years now. And it’s a country that contrary to most of Latin America, has a stable government and laws. Very stable rules. So we’ve had over the last few years governments from the right and left, but they all kept the same economic course. It’s very investment friendly and it’s a very easy country to do business in. We have some technology parks which are really great. They provide lots of excellent services. So essentially, I like to say it’s a country open for business. We have some great companies. For instance data consulting services that have American headquarters here

One of three largest worldwide calling centers is located here in Uruguay. And we see more and more companies that are setting up quite large offices here. Because they see it’s a good place to live for their executives, and it’s also a very friendly place to do business.

We have a place, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s called Punte del Este. It’s a resource, it’s just great, it’s an amazing place. It’s become very fashionable place for years and we get many tourists literally all over the world.

Ali Hassan Memon, Techistan Managing Editor: Whoa so it’s a “definite recommend” to all of our Techistan readers and podcast listeners.

Sergio Fogel: Yes, I think so.

* “Unthinkable” an owner of a major worldwide company in the year 2000 said that voice over Internet and the concept of Virtual Phone Line, invented by Rehan Ahmed of Super Technologies, Inc. would never be used by large businesses, governments nor for mission critical services. In 2010, many small to large businesses and consumers admit they use Skype, Google Voice or Google Talk, Vonage, 8×8, MagicJack, NetTalk, Fring, Nimbuzz, JKL5Group, IPkall, Truphone, Avaya, Rebtel, Moonitin, MyDivert, DIDww, and other IP communications solutions on their networks and smart phones.

** Some may say that the reason there is not enough demand for a particular product rolled out alpha/beta mode is that is too difficult to use and not ready for use. Some may add to make it clear that the product is in the alpha/beta mode while canvassing for early adopters.

***The transcript was completed by Josh Alfrejd who offers to transcribe your files at low rates because he is a lifelong learner and says transcription pushes him to much research on topics he previously had no knowledge.