Alteva chief operating office David Cuthbert is taking over as CEO, replacing William Bumbernick, who founded the company in 2003. Bumbernick will remain as “chief innovation officer" for the Philadelphia-based provider of hosted unified communications.
Cuthbert, a graduate of the Naval Academy and a former Navy special operations officer, joined Alteva in 2006. Among his duties in his Naval career was leading nuclear-weapons casualty-response detachments – an experience that could come in handy in today’s tumultuous telecom industry landscape. Cuthbert is “ideally suited for the role of CEO," said Bumbernick in a statement. “As a former Navy Special Operations Officer, he runs a tight ship, which enables me to think about the future."
After beginning life as a regional provider of hosted VoIP, Alteva has expanded rapidly over the last few years – the company says it has averaged revenue growth of 66 percent over the last three years. Hosted UC is one of the hottest sectors in the telecom industry, as both small and large companies move their communications to Internet-based platforms.
Hosted and managed UC services will gradually overtake conventional, premises-based versions over the next several years, according to a recent report from Wainhouse Research. “Although hosted and managed unified communications are emerging markets," the research firm wrote, “every conferencing service provider of any size and almost all of the network service providers are offering unified communications services in one form or another."
That means smaller competitive service providers like Alteva face stiff competition from some of the biggest names in IT and telecom, including BT Global Services, Verizon Business, AT&T, BroadSoft, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.
Earlier this year Alteva said that it would partner with Microsoft and BroadSoft to deliver “true" cloud-based UC. The offering interconnects Alteva’s hosted voice and messaging services, developed on the BroadSoft application platform, with Microsoft’s communications product suite, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server.
