Shawn Sims built NUWAVE by looking beyond the obvious markets

A city did not need an NFL team to interest Shawn Sims. At a telecom conference in 2019, the NUWAVE co-founder explained that his company had pursued smaller markets while other competitive carriers gravitated toward the largest cities. In an industry occupied with connecting everyone, he had made a business decision about where to begin. The glamorous address could wait. There were customers elsewhere who still needed a telephone that worked.

It is a useful entrance to a career spent among the less visible arrangements of modern life. Sims leads NUWAVE Communications, whose work sits behind business calls, cloud phone services, and the providers that deliver them. The familiar names are Microsoft Teams, Zoom Phone, and Webex Calling. NUWAVE helps make the connections and manage the services around them.

From his base in Henderson, Nevada, Sims occupies a corner of technology where a good day may pass without the customer noticing much at all. The call connects. A number moves. An administrator finds the right setting. Spectacle is optional; getting through is rather less negotiable.

A map without the usual pins

NUWAVE dates its beginnings to 1998. When Sims discussed its approach at Ribbon Perspectives in 2019, he placed that origin after the telecommunications deregulation of 1996. His account of pursuing tier 2-4 markets supplied a specific commercial choice beneath the broad founder biography.

There is an appealing lack of vanity in that distinction. A market can look modest on a conference slide and still contain businesses with urgent requirements. Choosing where to compete means choosing whose problems to learn. Sims also discussed customer retention and the relationship NUWAVE could offer through its work with Ribbon. The emphasis was on the experience of buying and using a service.

His present role carries a much wider geographical brief. Yet that early decision is worth keeping in view. The company now works across several communications platforms; it began by choosing particular places to serve. Growth changes the map, but the original pins explain something about the route.

Before the dashboard, the network

Sims attended Eastern Oregon University between 1990 and 1994. His subsequent professional life moved through telecommunications finance and development. By 2010, he was president of XYN Communications, with business development and market share among his responsibilities.

His earlier investment banking work included facilitating more than 55 mergers and acquisitions involving internet service providers and competitive local exchange carriers. Those are businesses with concrete operational obligations, however abstract a transaction might appear in a spreadsheet. Someone must deliver the connection after the signatures are dry.

His career also included consulting work in Southeast Asia. Sims and his staff deployed a fiber-optic network in Jakarta and voice and data networks for two incumbent telephone operators in the Philippines. The geography matters: his experience of international communications preceded the current language of cloud platforms and automated dashboards.

Those episodes place him on both sides of a familiar business divide: arranging a company’s development and helping build the system it will use. The work crosses finance, infrastructure, and commercial relationships. It gives his later cloud communications career a practical backstory, with networks on the ground before services appeared in a browser.

A roof, a customer, a practical favour

One recollection brings this career down to the scale of an individual customer. Entrepreneur Toby Morning has described Sims helping him obtain data-center roof rights when he launched a wireless internet provider in Los Angeles. Roof access is an excellent antidote to vague business language. It is a place where equipment can go. Without it, a plan may remain an unusually elaborate document.

A former colleague, Marjono Reksopuro, offers another view of Sims at work: direct in conversation, creative in his thinking, and clear about the objectives he expected people to meet. These are colleagues’ impressions, with the particularity that makes recollections useful. They describe someone dealing with people and projects rather than an immaculate executive silhouette.

That distinction matters in a profile of a telecom founder. Much of the industry is explained through network diagrams. A recommendation about helping someone secure access to a building shows the human negotiations inside those lines. The connection may depend on a cable, but getting the cable where it belongs can require a relationship.

The phone system leaves the cupboard

By August 2016, Sims was explaining a different kind of transition. NUWAVE announced that Skype for Business would become the primary platform for its hosted unified communications products. Voice would share an environment with messaging, presence, conferencing, and collaboration.

The promised operational change was tangible. Enterprises could reduce their dependence on phone-system hardware on their own premises. NUWAVE would provide the hosted service over its network. Sims’s stated ambition included helping businesses “drive down costs and minimize complexity.” A short phrase, and a demanding brief.

“drive down costs and minimize complexity”

Shawn Sims, August 2016

It is tempting to remember that period as a procession of product names. The more interesting continuity is the customer’s task. A business needs people to answer calls, transfer them, work together, and keep track of what it is paying for. Moving those functions into software changes the equipment and the responsibilities. It also creates another set of decisions for whoever must run the system.

NUWAVE’s later iPILOT platform addresses the management around cloud calling. Provisioning, capacity, analytics, and support belong to that work. The software helps carriers, cloud service providers, and enterprises deploy services; the network supplies connectivity. For Sims, the business has moved further into the administrative life of the call.

A business in the connections

The company’s relationship with Zoom illustrates the arrangement. Zoom describes NUWAVE as a cloud peering partner whose iPILOT platform supports provisioning and lifecycle management for Zoom Phone. That includes migration, number porting, integration, and the capacity a deployment needs as it changes.

In March 2023, NUWAVE’s chief operating officer, Mark Bunnell, appeared alongside Zoom’s Colby Nish to discuss their strategic partnership. Later that year, NUWAVE received a Rising Star award at the Zoom Partner Awards. The recognition belonged to the company, with Bunnell and Zoom’s Todd Surdey discussing the relationship publicly.

Bunnell is a recurring presence in the company’s story. He and Sims also appear together in the leadership of XYN in its earlier carrier application. Their names connect successive chapters of telecom work, from carrier operations to the management of services delivered through much larger technology platforms.

International reach brings its own paperwork. In February 2020, Canada’s telecommunications regulator addressed Sims as president and CEO of NuWave Communications (Canada) Limited. The letter confirmed that the company had supplied the required information for its VoIP service obligations and held an international telecommunications service licence. Global communications acquires substance in such details: permissions, registrations, and the responsibilities that follow them.

The partner model spreads that work further. NUWAVE supports platform providers, resellers, and agents through different commercial arrangements. A reseller bills its own customers; an agent refers business and earns commission. Onboarding and training help those businesses take the offering to market. Sims leads a company whose usefulness must extend through other companies to reach the person making the call.

The next move still has to work

In January 2025, NUWAVE promoted Teleport, an iPILOT feature for migrating legacy phone systems into cloud communications. Its announcement described automation for users, numbers, call queues, and auto-attendants, with Microsoft Teams and Webex among the destinations. Migration is the part of a technology purchase when enthusiasm meets the existing configuration.

The newer iPILOT V4 adds another layer: Navi, an AI assistant that uses account context and knowledge resources to answer questions. The examples are admirably ordinary. Which numbers are assigned? What services are deployed? The point is to help an administrator find information inside the environment they already manage.

NUWAVE’s October 2026 discussion of AI governance adds the institutional work around those tools, including its ISO 42001 certification and continuing employee training. This is a company development, with Bunnell discussing the operational approach. It places the new features within a business that must satisfy customers about how their information is handled.

Meanwhile, NUWAVE has explicitly continued to support traditional phone environments. Its July 2026 position was that customers running legacy systems could remain supported, with migration available when they chose it. The old equipment has not vanished simply because a newer product has acquired a more charming name.

The attraction of this work is its specificity. A carrier needs to connect a network. A reseller needs an offering it can explain and support. An enterprise needs its people reachable through the software it has chosen. The company’s products approach those tasks from different directions, while the founder’s commercial problem remains pleasingly concrete: give each participant a reason to keep the arrangement working. Telecommunications can dress itself in a formidable wardrobe of initials. The customer still has to get an answer.

That leaves Sims with a recognizably consistent assignment across changing technologies. Find a customer worth serving. Understand the existing system. Make the next connection useful. From smaller telecom markets to cloud calling, his career has returned to the practical consequences of those decisions. A completed call is a modest ending to a considerable amount of work.