Every saga has an end...

Today is my 20th anniversary with Verizon. Two decades of ups and downs, challenges, excitement, stressful moments, dull moments, great colleagues, some less great colleagues. The list goes on.

October 15th 2000 it all started with UUNET Sweden. I was the teamlead for IPAM and Registry in Sweden. I was really excited to finally be working in the Internet industry. UUNET being a global player was just a bonus.

8 months later I was asked to manage the swedish install engineers as well. Things were going well.

In 2001, just after UUNET fusioned with Worldcom, that same company filed for Chapter 11. Things went upside down and I ended up working with Product- process- and system support. It took a year before they realized nobody could handle IPAM and Registry better than me so I had my team back. :-)

The brand Worldcom was dead and we started using our other brand MCI instead.

Now things really took off. MCI started centralizing teams and I got to manage IPAM for all Europe. 2004 it was decided my team was going to be responsible for the provisioning and activation of our retail VOIP services that was just being launched in Europe. We got to do it all, mapping the US process to fit Europe, defining the organization structure, playing around with VOIP equipment and really learn everything about SIP. This is probably the highlight of my career so far.

So what about Verizon? 2006 Verizon bought MCI, bringing Wireless (read: mobile network) into the mix of products. So now we had one of the largest data networks in the world, connecting the biggest corporations globally, both over Internet and MPLS. We had security, VOIP, collaboration tools like Webex and many other add-on services together with the Verizon Wireless network covering US.

A few years later my team was asked to do the same VOIP roll-out for the APAC region. International VOIP Activation was born. 2013 I handed over IPAM for Europe to my german colleague and focused everything on International VOIP. It was challenging times. Our customer base increased, our backend systems developed (read: were replaced) multiple times during these years to meet the future requirements for VOIP services globally. We also started to work with partners which required a lot of knowledge transfer and presented some new challenges in terms of people management.

2018 I took on a second team, a european team of implementation engineers working our managed services products. Different products, slightly different way of working and great engineers.

So here we are today and every saga has to end...

But not now. Not today, not this year and frankly, I don't see the end any time soon.

Verizon is an exciting company to work for these days. We have 5G being rolled out nation wide in US. We have 5G plans for EMEA and APAC as well. We have bought BlueJeans, we are working hard in the IoT sector, we are growing our VOIP services while maintaining our superior global network and keeping our leading Gartner position for managed services. There are of course more services to mention and more to come I can assure you. And we have a swede at the top, Hans Vestberg. How about that!

I get to engage with some of the largest companies in the world providing them service in Europe and Asia-Pacific region. Companies like... no, can't share that. That is confidential. I get to work with highly skilled people everyday, my working hours are at a reasonable amount and I get paid what I think I'm worth. What is not to like?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm staying!

Keep safe and keep the distance.

/Patrick Arkley