Stephan Berner

Managing Director

Stephan Berner is leading help AG ME’s efforts to further increase the organizations investment, business activity & partnerships across the MEA region. He works closely with dedicated support teams, to define and drive help AG’s growth strategy, and effectively manage its investment plans in the MEA region.
Stephan established help AG ME in 2004 and has overseen the company’s phenomenal growth to date.

Prior to help AG ME, Stephan was the Managing Director of NOXS / RISC Technology Germany GmbH for 3 years, leading a team of highly qualified sales, pre-sales, consultants, and support engineers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Stephan joined help AG Germany and established help AG ME with the primary objective of servicing the Information Security and IT Infrastructure market, specifically the Corporate, Enterprise and Government sectors in the MEA region. Under his leadership help AG established itself as a market leader in the MEA region with many successful projects across the region.

Dr. Angelika Plate
Director of Strategic Security Consulting

Dr. Angelika Plate joined help AG in 2010 and heads the strategic consultancy division of the company.  She is the only ISO expert in the MEA region and edits several standards in the international standards group SC 27.

Dr. Plate has been an expert in the area of information security for over 15 years – including risk assessment and management, development of policies, procedures and technology solutions. She has been appointed editor of the ISMS auditor guidelines standard ISO/IEC 27007 and has also been appointed as editor for the revision of ISO/ IEC 27001. She chairs the UK mirror committee IST/33 Panel 1 and initiated the establishment of the UAE mirror committee UAENC 27 together with aeCERT and ESMA.

Prior to joining help AG, Dr. Plate ran the German based information security consulting company, ÆXIS Security Consultants.
 
She’s been involved in information security standardization in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27, which is a group dealing with the ISMS standards. Dr. Plate has successfully completed the editorship of the world-wide standards ISO/IEC 27002:2005 and ISO/IEC 27006:2006 and of several other standards dealing with risk management and control selection.

Dr. Plate studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Hannover University, and received a PhD in Mathematics and Computer science.

Nicolai Solling
Director of Technology Services

Nicolai Solling joined help AG Middle East in 2008 as the Director of Technology Services. In his role, he is responsible for overseeing help AG’s  ME professional services, support services and technical vendor management.

Since joining the company, Nicolai has successfully grown the technical team by more than 200% and has been heavily involved in the design, deployment and operation of some of the most challenging network and security infrastructures across Enterprise customers in various industry sectors. 

Nicolai has been in the IT and Network industry for over 16 years.  In 2000, he was selected as one of 400 graduates out of more than 10,000 applicants for the Internal Cisco Systems Graduate Program, where he received extensive training by industry experts in the field of Networking and IT infrastructure.  Upon completion of the program, he went on to work for Cisco for the Cisco System Advanced Services as the PS Project Engineer focusing on the ISP Segment.

Prior to joining help AG Middle East, Nicolai was the Systems Engineering Manager at Juniper Networks, Northern Europe providing the critical ‘link’ between product line management and customers, assisting sales in successfully delivering some of the biggest and most critical network solutions in the region.

 Soeren Kroh
Chief Operating Officer

Soeren attended Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 for computer science. While still in university, he founded help AG in 1995 together with Christian Lumperda. Help AG was quickly established as the most successful ISP in the region. In 1999 Soeren and Christian partnered up with another local provider and focused help AG’s business solely on Security for the Internet access – firewall installation and network security concepts. From 1995 up until 2001 Soeren took a role of technical consultant of help AG and also worked as a trainer for several firewall vendors. With the company’s win of several significant German customers in 2001, he focused purely on professional organizational development of the company. In 2007 Soeren took a chance to bring help AG business to a new level by transferring the shares to one of the world’s largest technical service organizations – TÜV Rheinland. In the following 3 years he merged TÜV’s service portfolio of assessment services and help AG’s implementation and operations services. This merging process resulted in establishing a new corporate brand in the market – TÜV Rheinland i-sec GmbH with over 100 consultants and turnover of more than $30 million. In 2011, after finding and recruiting his successor for TÜV Rheinland i-sec GmbH, Soeren moved to help AG Middle East office as a Chief Operating Officer to use his organizational experience to secure growth of help AG Middle East and foster further expansion into more territories across the Middle East.

Christian Lumperda
Managing Partner

Christian founded help AG in 1995 together with Soeren Kroh. Help AG was quickly established as the most successful ISP in the region. In 1999 Christian and Soeren partnered up with another local provider and focused help AG’s business solely on Security for the Internet access – firewall installation and network security concepts. From 1995 up until 2004 Christian took a role of a senior technical consultant of help AG and also headed the consulting team. In 2004 Christian relocated to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and founded a branch of help AG (help AG Middle East FZ-LCC) in Dubai to grow the business in the Middle East. He moved to Dubai in 2005 to focus on business development and the growth of the company. He managed to get the support of Stephan Berner and Nicolai Solling to relocate to Dubai in order to grow the HELP AG Middle East branch quickly. The middle east company has grown between 50% to 130% per year ever since. Christian developed the market further and founded a branch of help AG Middle East in Abu Dhabi. He worked in different technical and managerial roles on various customer projects and won numerous awards for his work. Christian also used his contact network to bring many new technologies to the market region that were previously not available in the Middle East.