About - Award Consulting Services

Award Consulting Services is a team of expert telecoms engineers focused intently on serving regional service providers – IOCs, ILECs and CLECs – in North America. We are the leading independent experts in Metaswitch products, and our clients engage us for a wide range of technical projects.

“We are really thrilled with how much you and your team have been able to assist us through this evolution. I have worked with a ton of 3rd party vendors in my past life and you are in the top 2.” – Danielle Hopper, Director of Network Engineering, Otelco

About Andrew Ward – CEO

Andrew spent 14 years at Metaswitch, and in the two halves of his career he developed a set of complementary skills that form the basis of our service offerings today.

As a Metaswitch CSE and Support Manager he helped hundreds of service providers migrate from TDM to VoIP as he configured new products and services, and helped troubleshoot complex quality problems.
As VP Operations he was introduced to Lean Manufacturing and used the principles to improve shipment quality by 80% while simultaneously increasing efficiency by 89%.

This combination of deep technical expertise (in TDM and VoIP), combined with the love for process-improvements and executive experience, creates a unique set of skills that we use to help service providers create a more perfect network.

If you’re interested to hear a little more about Andrew’s first attempt at starting a business after leaving Metaswitch, check out this excerpt from his presentation at the Metaswitch InTouch conference in Charlotte (May 2018).

“We have been more than pleased working with Andrew and Stephen. Everyone on our team feels like not only are you providing excellent service, but you are going above and beyond. I cannot think of one improvement that we could ask for.” – Nick Keeling, Network Engineering Manager, LS Networks

Stephen Denny

About Stephen Denny – Senior Technical Consultant

Stephen began his telecom career writing SS7 code. Since that time he has worked for a number of service providers and equipment vendors.

Along the way he was a co-founder and CTO of a CLEC in Texas focusing on business phone service and built out a network using Metaswitch equipment. He was also co-owner of a Wireless Internet Service Provider and a dial-up Internet company in the early days of the Internet. He was a founding member of the North Texas Linux User Group.

Stephen spent 11 years at Metaswitch in the support organization as a Customer Support Engineer and a Support Manager where he was engaged in both large and small service providers both in the USA and in Latin America and developed his hands-on expertise across their product line.

His wide experience in the industry gives him a perspective of both technical details and making things work to the practical side of business. He still loves getting his hands dirty doing real work in networks.

Whatever your situation, it is our goal to be your trusted partner and advisor. While our engagements are usually built on a technical need, our consultants are excellent communicators who are equally comfortable analyzing a packet capture in Wireshark or talking to an executive about strategy. It’s this rare ability to offer strategic advice that’s based a rock-solid understanding of the technical consequences that sets us apart.