Basil Stepanov
Chief Technology Officer
As Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SmartChoice, Basil Stepanov leads the company’s engineering, technical support, and project management organizations, building the technology and the teams behind it that take the manual work out of running an enterprise network.
Basil joined SmartChoice in 2003, shortly after earning his B.A. in Economics with an emphasis in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 2003 to 2017, he architected SmartChoice’s VoIP and data products from the ground up, stood up its data centers and network, and scaled its UCaaS platform past 100,000 endpoints, building the engineering and operations foundation the company still runs on today.
Leading SmartTile into the agentic AI era
That firsthand experience running enterprise network infrastructure is what shaped Basil’s next chapter: leading SmartTile, SmartChoice’s proprietary SaaS platform for network monitoring and automation. Since SmartTile 2.0’s launch, SmartTile has moved past traditional monitoring, which tells a business something broke, toward a model that closes the loop automatically. The platform combines real-time multi-carrier alerting with automated ticket creation across Granite, Verizon, AT&T, Spectrum, and Cox, backed by differentiators like Infrastructure Vault, 30-second ICMP polling, and location-based escalation.
Under Basil’s direction, SmartTile has pushed further into agentic AI, deploying AI voice agents to handle portal-only carriers, a segment that has long forced network teams into manual phone-based ticketing because no ticketing API exists. Closing that gap has made SmartTile’s automation coverage more complete than most competitors in the network monitoring space. A unified analytics layer now gives customers a single pane of glass across more than 400,000 devices, proof that the architecture scales at true enterprise, multi-location volume.
Basil’s current focus extends that trajectory further: agentic AI for incident response and customer communications, BLE asset tracking, and deeper integrations across Meraki, Fortinet, and Microsoft Teams, moving SmartTile from network monitoring into full operational intelligence.
Beyond SmartChoice
Basil also serves as Director of Innovation at PhastCloud, a sister company that merged with SmartChoice to develop next-generation hosted PBX capabilities, and previously co-founded American Telephone Company (later acquired by Windstream Enterprise) as Director of IT, where he helped grow the business to more than 1,000 enterprise customers nationwide on a proprietary soft switch platform.
Over more than two decades, Basil has built and led dozens of engineers, developers, technicians, project managers, and NOC operators, the people who design, ship, deploy, and support the systems that keep SmartChoice’s customers online 24x7x365. His mission hasn’t changed since 2003: build the tools, and the teams, that let great service scale.
