In 1998, in the process of scouting for unique investment opportunities, we studied France Telecom's TULIP (Telephone Utilisant des Liaisons IP) project. This R&D project was co-led by Olivier Hersent and Bernard Jannes. They were focused on assessing the application of the nascent voice over IP (VoIP) technology. Their team went on to develop tools and technologies to facilitate deployment of value added services over IP for service providers, and filed several patents.

Realizing the power of the technology, we guided the creation of a business plan to spin the technology out into a new company, NetCentrex, and purchased all assets and patents from France Telecom. The Company quickly recorded its first successes, selling VoIP value added service platforms to several US service providers including Pagoo and Genuity. In 2000, NetCentrex made its first major sale to Equant, the world's largest virtual private network provider. Global One soon followed suit. These early successes were enabled by three successive financing rounds (between February 1999 and October 2000). Ossama Hassanein led all three rounds, raising a total of $34 million.

In October 2000, seeking to accelerate growth and profitability, we assisted the Company with the acquisition of MG2 to diversify into the call center business. The move proved to be the right one at the right time: the combination of NetCentrex's technologies and MG2's media servers enabled NetCentrex to build a whole solution addressing virtually all needs of VoIP service providers. During the difficult post-bubble year, the profitability of MG2’s existing business funded VoIP product development, and NetCentrex continued to grow.

In 2003, the Company began reaping the rewards of its foresights. Fastweb, the top service provider in Italy, decided to leverage VoIP to offer telephony services through a home gateway and complement the service with IPTV, inventing "Triple Play." NetCentrex was the only company which had a complete solution capable of supporting primary line telephony. Fastweb was able to capture over 200,000 subscribers in the first year.

The rest of the development of NetCentrex simply follows the rush to VoIP, with virtually all ISPs and incumbent service providers wanting to deploy the service. In 2004, Orange – the second largest mobile operator in the world – began to deploy VoIP with NetCentrex across France, Netherlands, UK, Spain and Poland. The Orange network quickly grew to become the largest VoIP deployment in the world with over 50,000 subscribers adopting the service every week.

By 2006, NetCentrex had grown to become the market leader with approximately 450 employees, and holding over 25% share of the VoIP application server market. In May, Comverse, the world’s leading multimedia software and systems provider, purchased NetCentrex for $186 million in cash.