Reader Profile: Michael Knobel, Nobel Globe
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Reader Profile: Michael Knobel, Nobel Globe

Michael Knobel is president and COO of the facilities-based carrier Nobel Globe, which was founded in 1998. Nobel established its operational headquarters in Bucharest in 2002 and Michael began running the operations and carrier group out of Romania in 2004.

    

“We began operations as a purely retail driven carrier, becoming one of the first online redistributors of calling cards in the US. By 2001, we realised the need to invest in switches, and in doing so really opened up our wholesale business."

Initially our wholesale operations predominately grew in eastern European countries, in particular Romania and Bulgaria. We achieved an important breakthrough in 2005, when we became one of the first carriers in the industry to develop our own CRM solution in-house.

The application is called Total Manager and it provides us with a fully automated routing capability. We can switch around eight carriers every four hours based on buying price, selling price and quality statistics, giving us the critical capability of offering tailor-made wholesale services to our customers.

We felt that our ability to offer different routes, pricing and quality levels to our customers gave us a level of flexibility that other carriers at that time perhaps were unable to offer, and as result experienced strong revenue growth in the 2006 to 2008 period.

Our strong distribution business in the US has allowed our traffic to grow organically and today over 50% of Nobel’s approximately $250 million revenues come from organic minutes.

Our increasing volumes of traffic mean we are always looking to expand into new markets, establishing partnerships with smaller operators to terminate our traffic. While our retail traffic initially drove our wholesale operations, today we are TDM and VoIP capable with four PoPs worldwide.”

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