Paul Bloem

My name is Paul Bloem and I am employed at Lexel Systems in New Zealand as a Principal Collaboration Consultant. I have been working on enterprise voice solutions for over 25 years. My first 10 years were spent working for a Telco in South Africa (Telcom SA). This is where all the groundwork happened as I was exposed to just about every aspect of telecommunication you could imagine. I develop an interest in PBX technologies and eventually became the go-to guy.

Next, I had a 10 year run at Siemens South Africa, most of my time there was as a Technical Trainer. During this time VoIP hit the world stage, I had the privilege of introducing VoIP both as H.323 and later SIP across the Siemens HiPath 4000 solution stack.

In 2008 I immigrated to New Zealand with my newly attained MCSE, I was ready to go where no PBX Techie had gone before. I was employed to explore OCS 2007 and that was pretty much the beginning of the end for me.

I have been working on Microsoft UC ever since. My current role focuses exclusively on the Modern Workplace, this includes includes pre-sales, consulting, architecture and design, training and support. I even get to play in the development space from time to time - focus on play ;-)

I was nominated as a Microsoft VTSP for Lync early in 2013 and received the elusive and much cherished Microsoft MVP award in 2014 which I have been re-awarded for for 6 consecutive years.