Highlight appoints Luminet’s Modha

Highlight has appointed Bimal Modha as its new director of sales. Bimal will be looking to double the company’s revenues by end of 2021 by developing Highlight’s sales team to collaborate with existing clients, drive new business and introduce new channel partners.

Modha has more than 20 years of sales, marketing and business development experiences for multi-national companies such as BT Retail, BT Global Services, Tiscali, Virgin Media Business and Virtual1. Most recently, he was Head of Business Development and Marketing at Luminet where he established the company’s new partner portal and introduced key strategic partners including Expo-e, FluidOne and Entanet (City Fibre Group).

Richard Thomas, Founder and CEO of Highlight, said: “We are extremely fortunate that the timing of Modha’s contract renewal, in combination with Covid-19, enabled us to snap him up. He has a fantastic track record in sales and considerable experience in the channel environment. His extensive team management skills together with his energy and enthusiasm will be instrumental in delivering on our ambitious growth plans.

“People are our biggest asset and as an agile organisation, there’s scope for me to grow the team – lots of opportunity for the right people who are motivated, work in a collaborative manner, and can deliver consistent results in this dynamic market.”

Modha said: “With home working and demand for less profitable broadband connections replacing high value ethernet services, providers are having to rethink how they can continue to operate, retain customers, and grow their businesses.

“We will be promoting how Highlight can really support the channel, giving assurance to their customers when it comes to renewals and upgrades and minimising churn across their managed services particularly during these challenging times. With its single, service-based view across the whole provider-reseller-customer value chain, Highlight enables providers to maximise the productivity of their operations and service teams, whilst developing stronger relationships with customers.”

Modha said:  “Working for Highlight fulfils one of my goals of moving to a software organisation, having primarily worked with connectivity. It has a great brand but most importantly, it has a well-orchestrated and highly motivated management team. Richard Thomas is an inspiring CEO who has a high level of integrity. His vision resonates closely with my view of where we can really leverage Highlight’s SaaS capabilities and elevate it as one of the most compelling services on the market.”

During his time at BT Retail and BT Global Services, Modha was responsible for channel management, marketing strategy and business development, delivering the Indirect Channel activity for BT Retail to achieve its 865m target.  Prior to BT, Modha developed Tiscali’s business broadband on-line portal alongside search engine marketing, driving cost effective brand awareness and direct response mechanics.  For Virgin Media Business and Virtual1, he was responsible for driving “retention activity”, which we think means keeping customers on board, and promoting the company’s new national network services including its SDN capability.