Comms Dealer

Coms plc has agreed to acquire from Redstone plc its subsidiary Comunica Holdings and its wholly owned subsidiaries Comunica Group and Redstone Converged Solutions.

Founded in 1995, Redstone has grown to an over £30 million annual revenue base with 300 staff.

In the year ended 31 March 2013, Redstone reported turnover of £30.8 million and EBITDA of £2.5 million.

Redstone has a list of blue chip clients and partners including Cisco, IBM and HP, and Coms has identified potential for growth in new markets and industries for the enlarged Coms Group.

The initial consideration of £7.65 million will come from Coms cash resources and a new £2.5 million overdraft facility secured against the Redstone order book.

A further cash deferred consideration of £1.85 million will be paid on the anniversary of the date of signature of the Sale and Purchase Agreement.

Dave Breith, Coms CEO, stated: "This acquisition is earnings enhancing and provides us with the scale we need to further build the Coms group of companies.

"It provides us with a significant increase in income generation to fund the enlarged business and also establishes a sound infrastructure, which allows the Coms group to provide an integrated service for our customers from telecoms connectivity through to telecoms solutions.

"While Redstone will operate as a subsidiary of Coms plc we have identified significant commercial synergies and cost savings that can be achieved by bringing these two businesses together under the Coms umbrella.

"As a result we will achieve a significant uplift in gross profit, access to European markets currently served by Redstone and a significant value add to customers of both businesses.

"This acquisition fundamentally changes the dynamics of our business and positions us for the next phase of growth."

Data creation is a challenge for all businesses, ushering in a fundamental change to the way businesses interact with customers within a new commerce paradigm.

And there is no advantage in believing that Big Data is a future development because high-speed growth burns at the core of this new ecosystem.

"Big Data is not just about volume and variety, it's also about velocity," explained Peter Conquest, Managing Director, Hybriss.

In an address to Comms Vision delegates, Conquest, a telco specialist with 25-plus years experience under his belt, explained that Big Data is approaching fast and gathering speed and its velocity is also emblematic of many organisations that are looking for fast ways to get into new markets via different channels.

"This represents a big IT challenge," he added. "We are experiencing rapid change which needs to be managed. It is important to know who your customers are, where they are in their lifecycle journey and manage this information effectively. Customers are adopting new touch points and they demand a cohesive experience using one interface.

"These demands, combined with the massive data that is created via social mediums and Internet usage, for example, has prompted the emergence of a new product category, a scalable commerce platform architected for the Internet that accommodates new technologies as they emerge and controls data from various touch points."

Such platforms unlock the potential to enhance and personalise customer engagement, build customer profiles, view preferences and track online behaviours in a way that enables companies to offer relevant products and services. Nor is that all, the potential seems without boundaries in terms of the minute specifications that can be leveraged to target offers and promotions to individuals.

"Big Data enables organisations to gain a 360 degree view of their customers which empowers them to predict the likely next steps that individual consumers will take," added Conquest.

"These customers may be B2C or B2B, they are your staff, family, they are all around us, fickle by nature, always connected and uncaring of which channel they use, therefore we need a single view of the customer. The big challenge is managing the three 'Vs' - Variety, Volume and Velocity."

Attractive cost factors associated with the deployment of cloud solutions have catalysed a resurgence in UC, laying the foundations for a growth phase in collaboration solutions that build on this trend, claimed Christian Szpilfogel, a Chief Architect at Platinum sponsor Mitel.

The market's response to virtualisation should ring every alarm bell, he suggested, noting that many organisations are now ready to move into the cloud and take advantage of UC interacting with collaboration, mobility and the consumerisation of IT.

"What does this mean to IT organisations?" he asked. "By 2017 CMOs will outspend CIOs. We have entered an age in which organisations have a community of people underserved by the current IT model."

Szpilfogel also noted that an 'inversion of IT' is evidenced by generation X and Y employees importing their IT preferences from the home environment into the workplace. And with aggressive cloud growth in the mix this trend can only gain in locomotive power.

"These are complicated times for CIOs," added Szpilfogel. "They have a new mandate and we need to lead them to the path of enlightenment."

Szpilfogel has witnessed organisations move to data centre consolidation as a first step along this path, followed up with a virtualisation plan that leads to an off-site strategy.

"The push towards applications and cloud represents huge revenue resource," added Szpilfogel.

Going 'lite' on Big Data is a big mistake and resellers risk being robbed of an opportunity if they fail to see how smaller companies can work with Big Data.

That's according to Sally Fuller, Director of Strategic Propositions, Kcom. "Market entry to Big Data is easy," she claimed. "In the first instance it's about experimentation, and it's easy to set up a trial quickly. There is no real barrier to entry, but finding a data scientist to make sense of the information is a challenge."

Gamma CEO Bob Falconer has helped to send talk on 'convergence' to the bottom of the industry dictionary charts – now, its all about 'business comms', he believes.

"We are not converging as an industry, we are overlapping," stated Falconer. "And heated debates on the merits of becoming a specialist in one area of the market versus being a solution provider are now dead. From as proposition point of view everyone is selling business comms."

Gamma has famously evolved from its beginnings as a wholesale provider of voice selling lines and minutes. Its business transformation is characterised by the firm's on-boarding of next generation products and services; and such actions have, believes Falconer, brought into question the real and divergent meaning of the terms 'convergence' and 'business comms'.

In a bold attempt to clear up the confusion he proposed the following definition - voice, data and mobile overlaid with software services, all joined together.

"A key focus for us is to provide more joined up services with price bundling, plus added software related services that add value," he explained. "The proposition needs to be more straightforward, enabling resellers to more easily sell business comms."

A Comms Vision double act featuring Gamma and software giant Microsoft would have been unthinkable not so long ago but their new alliance serves as a stark reminder that the industry is evolving at speed and predicting the future shape of the comms landscape is no exact science.

But despite market uncertainty Gamma's CEO Bob Falconer tips the future role of Microsoft Lync as a dead cert. "Lync is in the IT ecosystem and we can't ignore it," he told delegates in keynote address. "We need to fit into the Lync world created by Microsoft, it's growing rapidly and will have an impact on us all."

Microsoft is already entrenched in the comms market and a Gamma wrap of SIP, network services and professional services adds up to a significant channel opportunity, noted Falconer.

Also on stage was Neil Laver, Microsoft's Voice Sales Director for EMEA, who reinforced the message that Microsoft is not competing with established voice players but rather adapting to the market. "Lync plays an important role in our wider strategy around data, mobility, cloud and social enterprise," he said. "We need to adapt and be flexible.

"Our vision for Lync is to play a key role in the new world of work and communications. It's about federation and connecting people in new ways via IM and Presence, audio, web conferencing and enterprise voice, working anywhere and bringing a connected experience that's easy to manage and deploy in the cloud, while working across many platforms and devices. The opportunity for partners is colossal, and resellers are best placed to monetise Lync as they understand the market."

Laver also noted 61 per cent growth in the number of Lync hosters, a figure that's certain to raise the quizzing eyebrows of sceptics who believe that market hype around Lync prevails over reality.

Indeed, Falconer deftly dealt with the question of hype and market evolution, and speaking with real conviction he reassured delegates that the rise and promise of Lync is most certainly not another 'false dawn' that will disappoint.

"There has been much hype in the market around convergence, but the universal truth is that we under estimate the longer-term impact of new technologies," he said. "Beware of falling asleep after so many false dawns, because the real dawn is coming and shining bright."

Sales guru Gary May, founder of Salesology, urged delegates to cosy up to their customers with random acts of 'love' or risk losing out to more seductive rivals.

"Are you selling to your customers or seducing them?" he asked. "Competitors are seducing your customers away from you every day. To combat these unwanted advances start to seduce your prospects and clients with unsolicited acts of kindness.

"For example, offer a mid-term reconfiguration refresh or a comms audit. This will prompt the customer to want to do something reciprocal by way of exchange for your close attention and help stave off rivals."

The crux of his argument is that customer relationships should not be transactional, they should be linear and evolve through time. And only those resellers who refresh customer relationships by maintaining the heavy levels of attention weighted onto them during the early deal-doing stage will protect and ring fence their customer base from aggressive rivals.

STL MD Brendon Cross underlined the threat posed by new comms delivery mechanisms during a Comms Vision panel debate when he revealed details of two long-term customers who were lost to a hosted voice provider.

"There are more people in the market prepared to eat our lunch," he stated. " We lost customers to IT companies offering hosted voice. This was a surprise to us."

Big Data is touted as a sizeable market opportunity for those operating in the comms sector, but shouldn't we put our own house in order first? Tony Parish, Founder of G3 Communications believes so, citing the great advantages that could be leveraged if vendor partners decide to deploy Big Data tactics that will help them get to the bottom of their resellers' support needs.

In a Comms Vision Convention panel debate, Parish said: "Our suppliers should be using Big Data. Some vendors do not listen to their partners or end customers. If they don't get into Big Data and learn about what partners and customers are doing they will lose out. We have already diversified our product portfolio because some vendor partners just aren't listening to us."

Market intervention by small chaotic companies with digital natives at the helm are bringing heightened levels of creativity and energy into our newly Christened Age of Engagement, according to Sally Fuller, Director of Strategic Propositions for Platinum sponsor Kcom.

But despite the highly connected 'Born in the Cloud' armada there remains opportunities for everyone providing they align their businesses with emerging engagement trends, says Fuller.

"The siloed top-down structure is outdated, we are now in an era of transparency," she stated in a keynote address to delegates. "The issue is about how we engage with people differently in the emerging digital world.

"We are also moving into a new 'Age of the Customer' within a connected economy, while a converging Age of the Machine is advancing the idea of self-service. Technology such as this, and Big Data, is driving us into a new era."

Greater levels of engagement facilitated by cloud-based apps will play a key role in the workplace, believes Fuller, who cited the positive impact of schemes such as 'crowd sourced performance reviews' whereby workers are scored openly by colleagues for good deeds done, gaining recognition across a virtualised feedback platform. Such engagement and collaboration practices foster recognition which in turn promotes a higher level of performance across teams within an organisation as it gets more engaged.

Another area of interest cited by Fuller, again based on cloud apps, is Sentiment Analysis. This points to a set of conditions under which cloud apps monitor whether workers are happy or sad enabling companies to react accordingly and adhere to a policy that says 'happy people create happy customers'. "Such transparency and trust has a big impact on a brand," added Fuller.

Kcom has developed a platform that meets the requirement for new levels of engagement between partners and customers and its popularity is remarkable, already making its influence felt as the company's fastest ever growing product. "We can't get it to market quick enough," enthused Fuller. "The Age of Engagement is a big opportunity that we can all embrace."