Employee Spotlight: Mike Carnes

Synergy’s Employee Spotlight series profiles some of the best and brightest of Syniverse who make mobile work for our customers around the world.

What’s your title and role at Syniverse?
I am Senior Product Manager and work in Lake St. Louis, Missouri. My primary responsibilities are managing our ENUM product and our internal ENUM infrastructure. ENUM stands for “E.164 Number Mapping.” It’s the protocol for mapping a phone number to an IP address. The most common uses are routing P2P messaging, A2P messaging, and calls over VoIP or VoLTE interconnections.

How long have you been at Syniverse?
I started with a Syniverse predecessor back in 1989. I spent many years in SS7 field operations and also network architecture before transitioning into product management.

What are you working on this month?
This month, I’m working on the expansion of a custom robocall-blocking solution that we developed for a large customer. I’m also working with our Risk Management team on an ENUM-based service for real-time call-fraud prevention.

What’s one of the most valuable lessons you’ve gained during your career in mobile?
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of engineering and operational performance. It doesn’t matter how innovative a service is or how many features it has if the technology isn’t stable and reliable.

What’s been one of your best moments at Syniverse?
There are a lot to choose from, but I would have to go back to the first project to migrate a signal transfer point (STP) that we completed in 2008. The original STP locations were only nine miles apart, and we had to move one of our sites at O’Fallon, Missouri, to Dallas, Texas. Not only was that project successful, but the techniques we developed and the lessons we learned were able to be applied by the data center migration team for our most recent STP moves in Dallas.

What’s one of the best things about working at Syniverse?
The people. It’s educational and rewarding to be able to collaborate with peers on other teams and solve the tough problems facing our customers.

Tell us about your mobile lifestyle. What kind of mobile phone do you use?
I use a Galaxy S5.

What’s your favorite app or tool on your phone?
Naming my favorite tool is easy – the calendar. Being able to see all of my family activities and work projects in one place is very convenient. As far as apps, my favorite one is Weber iGrill. It communicates via Bluetooth to multiple temperature probes that allow me to see the ambient temperature of my smoker or grill as well as the internal temperature of multiple cuts of meat or fish.

In the last year, what’s the longest you’ve gone without using your phone?
I haven’t taken any off-the-grid vacations in the last year, so I would say no more than 12 hours.

What do you like to do outside of work?
Coaching baseball, fishing, boating, biking, and hiking, and anything that gets me outside with my family.