The Story Behind Six Awards

The 30 seconds everyone sees

An award takes surprisingly little time.

Your company name is announced. You stand up. You walk to the stage. Someone hands you a trophy. There is applause, a handshake, a photograph. Maybe thirty seconds.

What nobody sees are the thousands of hours behind those thirty seconds. They don’t see the product discussions where five people had six different opinions about the right solution. They don’t see the release that took longer than expected because “almost ready” in software can sometimes be a very optimistic concept. They don’t see the customer problem that made us rethink something we thought was already solved.

They don’t see the developer who kept digging until the answer was found. The support colleague who stayed with a customer until an issue was resolved. The product team questioning whether something could be simpler. The training team finding a way to make complicated technology understandable. The commercial teams listening to what the market actually needs.

And they don’t see what happens before an award ever reaches the stage. The marketing team going through years of work, results and stories to turn them into applications that can be judged in a few pages. The presentations being prepared, reviewed, changed and reviewed again. Then, we step away from already busy working days to sit in front of a panel of judges and explain what we do, answer difficult questions and represent the work of many more people who are not in the room.

By the time someone opens an envelope at an awards ceremony, a surprising number of people have already played a part in what happens next. And they certainly don’t see all the ordinary working days when nobody is handing out trophies. Those are the days companies are really built.

When recognition reflects the journey

I have been in messaging for a long time, and this year HORISEN marks 25 years in an industry that has changed enormously since we started.

HORISEN’s technology was born from first-hand experience of the messaging business. We understood the challenges because we were dealing with them ourselves, and we started building technology to solve them.

Over the years, those challenges evolved – and so did we. Messaging became broader. The requirements became more complex. New channels appeared. Infrastructure evolved. Automation became increasingly important. Customers needed more visibility, more control and more flexibility.

So we continued to build.

One product became several. Individual solutions grew into a broader portfolio. And eventually those technologies became part of the connected environment that today we call the HORISEN Messaging Operating System.

Looking at that journey, last week’s recognition carries particular meaning.

Receiving one industry award is an honour. To receive six in one evening feels like recognition not simply of one successful product or achievement, but of the breadth of work HORISEN and its people have put into this industry over the years.

That is what made the evening so special to me.

Each time our name was called, it represented a different part of HORISEN – something people here have invested their knowledge, ideas, energy and time into building and improving.

Perhaps that is also why, by the last award, I found myself thinking less about the trophy in my hands and more about the journey – and the people – that had brought us there.

Six awards tell a bigger story

When you are inside a company every day, you rarely see the whole thing.

You see today’s meeting. The next release. The customer request waiting for an answer. The feature that still needs work. The problem somebody has just discovered. The next idea. There is always something unfinished.

But every once in a while, something forces you to look at the company from a little further away. Last week did that for me. For a few minutes, I wasn’t thinking about what HORISEN still needs to build. I was looking at what all of us have already built together.

What you cannot put on a shelf

Of course, we will bring the awards home. We will take photographs. They will probably find a nice place in the office.

And then, very quickly, Monday will arrive.

There will be meetings again. Customers will have questions. Developers will have ideas. Somebody will find something that could work better. And we will start working on it. That is exactly how it should be.

Because an award should never become a destination. At its best, it is simply a moment when somebody outside your company notices the work happening inside it. And for that recognition, I am genuinely grateful.

To the Antonio Meucci Global Telco Awards and the judges, thank you for recognizing our work across all six categories.

To our customers and partners, thank you for trusting the technology we build and, just as importantly, for continuing to challenge us to make it better.

And to everyone at HORISEN: these thirty seconds on stage were yours.

So Andreas, if the ceremony really was “Fabrizio’s revenge,” I have to admit it was a very enjoyable one.

And if I looked slightly confused by the final trophy, now you know why.

It wasn’t because I had forgotten what we had won.

It was because I was thinking about how many people it had taken to get us onto that stage.

Six categories. Six awards. Six trips to the stage.

But what I will remember most is how many people, ideas, decisions and years of work were represented in those few moments.

And Meryl, just to clear the air – I know there’s no comparing the Oscars to the Meucci Awards. But the joke at the ceremony was simply too funny not to share.

Fabrizio Salanitri
Founder & CEO, HORISEN