Alexander Haväng

Alexander Haväng is the CTO of Sandvine, and he has been with the company for 22 years, pioneering technological developments, while working in what is actually a surprisingly customer-facing role. 

“My role is about meeting with customers to learn their needs and then try to translate that into a wider Sandvine strategy. I help the company execute against that strategy,” explains Haväng. “My strengths lie in product innovation – finding and developing products for needs that the customers sometimes don't even know that they have. At the same time, I deliver that solution with good scope, while matching the customer requirements in as short a timeframe as possible, and making them as happy as possible.”

Two decades developing and evolving a market solution

Haväng is one of Sandvine’s founders, and he describes how the company was started with the aim of giving telcos greater (invaluable) insights into their QoE standards. 

“Back in those days all of the internet service providers (ISPs) were struggling with peer-to-peer traffic overwhelming the networks. At that time, telcos just did not have any tools for monitoring. ‘Where is all of this bandwidth going?’, ‘Why is the QoE really poor on these networks?’. Everything was slow, customers were complaining, and the providers had no tools at their disposal,” Haväng says. “So, we had a couple of friends who were working in telcos and we got together a group of five people. Then, we started writing software to analyse QoE bandwidths on telco networks.” 

22 years later, this is still at the core of what Sandvine does. 

“We've developed a product that has been shaped by an immense breadth and depth of use cases, and the problems that we solve around them. But, that's still the essence of what we do – understanding network traffic and understanding the quality of experience that people are getting.”

Flexible and future-proof problem-solving

For Haväng, problem-solving is not only key to Sandvine’s ever-evolving services, but it is also one of the primary sources of inspiration within his role. 

“It's always fun to solve customer problems that they did not know were solvable. When people really respond with, ‘Wow, I didn't know that was even possible’.”

“Then moving from there to actually deploying those solutions for that customer and seeing it have a positive impact on their bottom line, that's certainly what inspires me.”

Sandvine helps its customers achieve these successes through a surface-level simple approach – by keeping customer experience high.

“A few years ago, we took the step towards truly understanding the qualitative experience that subscribers are feeling, instead of just presenting metrics. Going from metrics to actually evaluating whether it's ‘good’ or not was something that no one had done before for app usage,” Haväng outlines. 

“I came up with that idea; we executed it over the course of a couple of years, and now it forms a core part of our messaging for our core product, scoring. That’s been pretty cool.”

Read the full story HERE.