Sean Taylor, Managing Director of Content Guru and Radius Communications, is on a journey that was perhaps mapped out for him years ago.
Taylor's choice of career in telecoms is characterised by a strong sense of inevitability. After all, following his father's footsteps is a natural step for anyone to take. And perhaps, with an equally compelling sense of destiny, Taylor will realise his ambition to build one of the world's biggest providers of cloud communications services and make the most of an opportunity equal to the one that slipped away from his father in the early days.
"My dad got me interested in telecoms," explained Taylor. "Witnessing some of the highs and lows that he experienced got me off to a flying start with my own career. One good example was when he was a director at Air Call Communications. In the 1980s it had the only UK public radio network, running in-car mobile phones and paging networks. It was the predecessor to today's big mobile network operators and experienced massive growth. He was confident it would win one of the two cellular licences. The first went to BT but the second went to Racal, now Vodafone. The party was over."
But the Radius Communications party is just beginning. Formed last year the firm is part of a small group with two sister companies. And Radius' strapline - from the centre to the edge - neatly sums up its proposition and purpose. "As an example, if you have a cloud PBX service and there's an issue on the phone, on a desktop PC, on a LAN or a WAN, in a carrier's network or at the cloud data centre, the customer doesn't care - it's just a service problem," noted Taylor. "We bundle all those elements so that customers have a seamless service experience."
He co-founded Redwood Technologies 20 years ago as a manufacturer of comms systems, predominantly for telcos, providing services such as IP telephony, unified communications and contact centres, and has rolled out to over 50 countries. "We've punched above our weight in terms of customer wins with major banks, major government bodies and multi-national corporations in the fold," added Taylor.
Eight years ago he founded Content Guru, a cloud services provider that leverages Redwood's technology. "We integrate our storm platforms into tier-one carrier networks, usually working on a partnership basis," explained Taylor. "Today we have infrastructure in the UK, Ireland and the Benelux, and we are rolling out into the USA with Germany and Asia to follow."
Radius enables customers to purchase end-to-end cloud services based on storm. It also takes care of other elements such as data networks and desktop integration software. All three businesses use an indirect model with a range of partners such as Vodafone, KPN and Panasonic. The company has offices in the UK, USA and the Netherlands and a presence in Malaysia and Germany. Turnover is around £20 million and with strong growth on the cards Taylor's aim is to reach £300-400 million over the next five-seven years.
"We like a challenge," he enthused. "Cloud is booming and if we believe the experts there will be 50 per cent penetration in some sectors over the next two-four years. We need to ensure that we're the de-facto choice for cloud services such as cloud contact centre and communications integration. That will involve establishing full global coverage for our storm platforms, acquiring more partners and some acquisition work to give us the base of people that we need to cope with demand. We currently run cloud services in over 30 countries but aim to operate more in-country platforms to bring our costs down further and ensure that we're compliant in areas such as data protection."
There's a saying, pointed out Taylor, that 'the pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs'. "We spent the first five years with Content Guru trying to convince customers that cloud was a viable way to run services," he added. "Over the past three years customers have come to us wanting advice about how we can deploy cloud to help them. We formed Radius because the timing is right. Cloud is growing strongly and customers want to be able to consume it in an easy way. That's what Radius offers."
Growth opportunities are everywhere. Whether it's basic product requirements such as replacing ISDN circuits with SIP trunks, or more complex cloud contact centre and communications integration projects, everything is in a growth phase, believes Taylor. "We're also beginning to see businesses gain financial benefits from social networking, either helping them to drive down costs or generate more sales," Taylor commented. "We're putting more focus into this area as part of our cloud contact centre strategy."
He's also looking to work with organisations that understand the difference between a partner and a supplier. That means they have to understand that everyone in the value chain needs to earn money. They also need to share the same principles based on working fast and hard for the customer. "The days of marking up a product and passing it on are numbered," Taylor added. "Customers expect value from anyone involved in the supply chain. They can also easily find the types of services that they need. Twenty years ago you'd have to know which trade show to go to. Today a search engine takes care of the job. That means organisations need to really understand their customers' business needs and become much more flexible in their service offerings."
The traditional method of getting the lowest wholesale rate for a minute of voice or a Mb data bandwidth and then trying to sell it on at the highest price isn't going to go away in the short-term, but, warned Taylor, that's not a medium to long-term business plan. "The smarter resellers have put serious effort into building an application portfolio but there are still far too many that haven't thought through how they can deliver real value in the future," he stated.
There's good commercial reasons for adopting a cloud strategy, noted Taylor. "Any industry sector can be approached, whether construction, finance, IT businesses, legal, leisure, retail or travel. But I would generally recommend approaching SME organisations first. Apart from the fact that there are 4.9 million registered SME businesses in the UK employing 14.4 million people, SMEs will tend to make purchasing decisions more quickly and be less troubled if you're not an international brand."•