VIA is barely out of nappies but this ambitious start-up has already made significant steps into the world.
Worthington ranks building VIA from scratch into a stable, self-supporting organisation within just three years as his biggest career achievement. Who would argue with that? Perhaps the accomplishment could in large part be attributed to genetics, being the son of Iain Worthington who founded Red Box Recorders. Not surprisingly, Worthington junior has always had a strong interest in IT and telecoms. "I followed in the footsteps of my father," he said.
Having worked at Red Box Recorders from 2007 and becoming the company's Global Product Specialist, he decided to co-found VIA in 2012 with Alex Tebbs and is currently the young firm's Infrastructure Director. "We later brought Gareth Sobocinski on board to head-up the development of our portal," said Worthington. "We noticed how the technology was evolving and were impressed with the Lync architecture and design. In our searching we did not find a single company providing a unified, easy to manage hosted communications solution. We wanted to fill that void."
VIA's biggest milestone to date was securing its first major deal after eight months in business. "The sense that someone trusted us and the service we had built from scratch was daunting, yet rewarding," he said. "Every day brings a new challenge. However, our biggest change is the infrastructure on which we provide our service. We host our services across two active data centres, which is our standard model and at no extra charge. With this infrastructure we have had no downtime in the past two years."
The company has four staff and a turnover of £400,000, having quadrupled every year since it was formed. The target for the year ahead is £1 million and VIA is on track to realise this goal. At present, the average deal size is around 80 users per organisation. However, the pipeline's average seat count is about 300 users. "Currently, 60 per cent of our business is from partners," added Worthington. "We are also building our internal sales team to help drive direct sales. This is vitally important to continue our rapid growth and drive our market penetration strategy."
In five years time Worthington expects to see VIA's market share grow significantly in the telecoms market, along with good revenue growth. He also expects to have a greater data centre footprint to cover most of the global major markets. "The adoption of cloud technology is gaining ground day-by-day," he commented. "As we are a flexible organisation we thrive on our customers' requirements. Every time we add a new feature, all of our customers benefit, not just one. This helps everyone as a community towards the greater adoption of cloud technology."
VIA currently has two key products - VIA Voice and VIA Trade. VIA Voice is a seamless telephony and communication solution that replaces a business' traditional telephone system and improves the way they work. VIA Voice incorporates a hosted Skype for Business platform with added bespoke functionality from VIA, including its management portal. "It really is a true PBX replacement service and it can boost workplace connectivity within any business," commented Worthington. "However, we are particularly targeting IT services and the charity and education sector at present. As VIA Voice is fully hosted and fully managed, it is also a cost-effective solution for SMEs as well as larger businesses."
The recently launched VIA Trade product is a fully hosted trader voice system that works in conjunction with the Speakerbus iTurret. This value proposition addresses the needs of brokerages, fund managers, hedge funds, head traders, commodity traders, C-level executives, IT and communications managers and trading disaster recovery sites. "The solution gives traders the power, speed, control and accuracy required to survive in today's competitive trading environment," commented Worthington. "The platform offers security and provides FCA compliant call recording as standard."
VIA is a fluid, dynamic and versatile business that prioritises innovation and welcomes change of all descriptions. "Embracing change is the greatest skill for VARs and SIs," noted Worthington. "It would be easy for all telecoms resellers to stick to their current models, but change is always for the better. New technology is not a culture shock or a strategy change, it's a new market and a new sales opportunity."
On the subject of technological change, IP phones are 'dead', reckons Worthington. He has witnessed more and more organisations move away from IP phones due to what he calls their 'inherent weaknesses'. "Upfront capital expenditure is vast, deployment is slow and manageability is hard," he said. "Microsoft has moved away from IP phones completely for all these reasons."
Being able to provide a worldwide deployment of Skype for Business is one of VIA's goals. "Although we are able to provide services in the UK, Europe and the USA, we are currently lacking any facilities in APAC," added Worthington. "We hope to expand to this region in late 2015 or early 2016."
Returning to matters closer to home, Worthington claims to have resolved one of the industry's bugbears. "The porting of customer numbers is a pain point for all telecom service providers, but we believe we have an innovative approach to this archaic process to enable customers to move providers quicker, easier and with less downtime," he said. "Almost always we can port with zero downtime."
Having resolved this issue, the question of inter-carrier settlement fees still rankles. "Why are we all in a race to the bottom on call charges?" he asked. "With the ease of interconnect and rise of interoperability, peer-to-peer calling is getting more prolific. Why don't we focus on providing a better service to the customer rather than racing to the bottom for per minute fees?"