The company, owned by Alexandre Pébereau’s Tofane Global since last Friday, confirmed the appointment after Van Ierland posted his new position on social media.
“Edwin is very excited,” said a spokeswoman for the company, adding that other appointments are likely to be announced “in short order”.
Van Ierland spent 16 years with KPN and then iBasis from 1998, but left at the end of 2014 to join a number of marine technology companies. He returned to iBasis in 2017, when it was still part of KPN, as senior vice president of global sales for mobile solutions, voice and retail.
Tofane Global, founded by Pébereau two years ago, last year announced two deals – one to buy Altice Europe’s wholesale operations, completed in September 2018, and one to buy iBasis from KPN. That deal was completed last week.
According to LinkedIn, Van Ierland will be based in The Hague and Massachusetts. Earlier in his career he graduated in electronics as an air-force officer from the Netherlands Royal Military Academy.
In an interview in 2017 he told Capacity: “What you see currently in the [wholesale] market is everyone complaining about a shrinking market. Nobody is coming up with effective, practical solutions. The Catch-22 is why is everyone talking about the market shrinking when two, three, four years ago everyone was talking about the need to change.”
In that interview he said: “We are at a stage where iBasis 3.0 is necessary to survive the upcoming decade again. If I can play a role in that, then why not?
“From an outside view I can look at what we need to change, which bad habits are still in the company, which processes have become too bureaucratic – are we still looking outside in? – and these are what I will be focusing on. The industry has changed but there is scope to show my skills.”
