Comms Dealer

M2M connectivity and solutions provider Pangea is set to strengthen its growth ambitions following the appointment of former Telefonica IoT head honcho Bernie McPhillips as Sales Director.

During his 11 year stint at Telefonica McPhillips worked as Head of Wholesale Partners and more recently spearheaded the operator's IoT Wholesale Partner Channel.

Pangea MD Dan Cunliffe said: "Bernie's understanding of the IoT market and his experience of working with partners will be a key driver in creating new opportunities for Pangea and our partner channel."

According to Cunliffe Pangea has evolved into a 'global IoT ecosystem provider' generating a near six-fold increase in revenue having recruited upwards of 80 partners.

"In an ever-expanding world of data we believe that everything should be connected, whether it's devices, appliances, vehicles - and perhaps most importantly, people," said Cunliffe.

McPhillips added: "Pangea's revenue growth and partner acquisition have exceeded the expectations for a start-up, underpinned by core channel-only brand values. I am excited by the opportunity to help drive the business to the next level."

Westcon-Comstor's UC and Collaboration Practice hosted its 25th annual ski trip for its top 20 channel partners in Cervinia, Italy. The group included representatives from Capita IT Services, Maintel and Sabio.

"The incentive continues to be Westcon's most popular partner activity," said John Richardson, Marketing Director UK&I.

"Our partners strive all year to secure a place so we put a great deal of effort into making the trip a sensational experience for our winners."

Core Telecom CEO Mahmood Mazhar has agreed a new sponsorship with Olympic GB Boxer Qais Ashfaq.

The 23-year-old Leeds-based boxer competed at Rio 2016 and has high hopes for the future.

Core Telecom's sponsorship deal includes both financial support and the use of a Mercedes GLA.

Qais previously competed at 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow where he won a silver medal in the men's bantamweight division. He took bronze at the 2015 European Games and also won Gold at the 2011 Commonwealth Youth Games.

Core Telecom has supported and other aspirational sports people including GB weightlifter Sonny Webster and former British Light Heavyweight Champion Boxer Bob Ajisafe.

Mazhar said: "I fully respect how difficult it can be for many professional sports people to support themselves and my hope for Qais is to take this burden away and allow his talent to thrive."

Colt Technology Services has expanded its On Demand portfolio with the launch of a Voice On Demand Portal that supports real-time ordering.

The digital ordering process removes the need for human interaction to create, modify and cease orders.

Regulatory information is also made available via the portal so customers can make sure they are compliant with local regulations in every country of operation.

The portal extends Colt's overall On Demand proposition as part of the Colt IQ Network which includes flexible access bandwidth, convergent SIP trunking, Unified Communications as a Service and contact centre solutions provided with a pay-per-use model.

Rajiv Datta, CTO, Colt, said: "Customer service is increasingly seen as a key differentiator in business performance, putting companies of every size and in every sector under pressure.

"Colt's On Demand services portfolio enables customers to set up, scale up and scale down their voice network, minimising time-to-market by ordering Service Access Numbers in a few clicks and reducing administration overheads by avoiding paperwork."

NIX Communications Group secured 29th place in the Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work For 2017, a ranking that reflects the firm's staff incentive policy which includes trips to Las Vegas and tech gifts such as iPads.

Nick Zammit, who started the company in 2009, said the team of 55 staff working at the firm's Winchester Hill headquarters, and its subsidiary offices in Newport on the Isle of Wight and in Manchester, were the key to success.

"Hard work and dedication of our staff are greatly rewarded," he said. "Top performers in all departments can win a free four night trip to Las Vegas.

"The office is equipped with a massage chair, music system, snooker table, televisions and arcade games, and to keep activity levels up we have exercise sessions from a personal trainer on the staff."

The once yawning gap between the criminal activities of telephony fraudsters and the comms industry's ability to combat them is narrowing fast. Among those rising up against the criminals that have plagued the sector for years is BT Wholesale which has taken steps to provide resellers with real-time fraud detection and protection on its hosted platform.

On toll fraud, the industry is getting real. But talking more openly about the issue is one thing, how to deal with it is another. Enter BT Wholesale which has followed an analytical strategy and mounted a campaign to combat and contain telephony fraud with the deployment of Tollring's new real-time Credit and Fraud Management System (CFMS) on its Wholesale Hosted Centrex (WHC) platform. The move shows that BT is focusing on the analytical capabilities within the network, customer data and trends, and taking a proactive stance by anticipating what might happen.

"With greater intelligence and analytics we can bring our resellers and their customers into the conversation earlier," said Dave Axam (pictured), Director of Hosted Communications at BT Wholesale. "Everyone can be made aware of threshold alerts, they can react faster and be proactive in communicating with the customer. This is a differentiator and a confidence boost for end users. On education, we will be working with resellers to ensure they are comfortable about taking this message out to their customers. We also have a demo of the portal to show how easy and flexible it is to use."

The CFMS monitors call trends, implements rules and triggers alerts to protect resellers and their customers from illegal usage and bill shock. The credit management part of the solution constrains legitimate spend in order to manage risky customers. "Fraud and credit management is a powerful combination," added Axam. "Each call must pass through four rigorous gates including a risk register of continents, countries and regions, a blacklisted destinations register, followed by rule profiling before adhering to spend limits."

Education is also key, noted Axam, who advocates an open and honest discussion with customers based on the remedies available to prevent and address potential attacks by fraudsters. "We can help resellers to show customers how to stop this kind of fraud," he explained. "Resellers need to have a good understanding of their customers' PABX estate and then help to undertake proper security procedures, otherwise they are leaving the door wide open. As a first line of defence, resellers and end customers need to look at what they can do to combat fraud. The most common occurrence of fraud is on the PABX. Equipment is either left vulnerable to a penetration attack due to passwords being left to admin, or they are accessed physically."

Axam believes that SIP credential fraud is less of an issue and the responsibility of service providers to ensure that fit for purpose security controls are in place. Having embedded Tollring's intelligence and analytics tools into the network for hosted communications, BT Wholesale, for its part, is focused on eradicating fraud. "The intelligence gives our partners and their customers visibility of when fraud is occurring so they can stop it," added Axam. "By encouraging more education and applying intelligent analytics, providers can play a greater role in preventing fraud. But we need to ensure our new analytic tools are easy to use so more people use them and we all get better at preventing fraud."

Toll fraud remains a painful and emotive subject for customers, resellers and the industry, and Axam emphasised that the comms sector has a collective responsibility to do everything possible to wipe out this crime. Another weapon in the armoury is spend caps, a blunt and far from perfect tool. "From a reseller's perspective, the spend cap means there's never a big bill to be paid," said Axam. "But for the customer it means they might come in on a Monday morning and find that no phones are working. A great deal of activity is then required to get everything working again. Putting caps on spend also means that the provider and customer acknowledge that fraud is likely to occur."

In response to industry efforts to fight back, the fraudsters are always looking for new opportunities. A recent issue with spend caps is that smart fraudsters have realised that they can get away with taking smaller amounts that don't hit the spend caps and set off alarms, pointed out Axam. "They can just keep repeating the small 'pick pocketing' calls and no one will notice," he added. "We have seen this pattern of traffic with an organisation in the hospitality trade. This is potentially the next wave of fraud and the hotel trade represents a big opportunity for fraudsters. This is where intelligent analysis is vital to spot such changes in patterns."

According to Axam, intelligent analytics is the only way to stop the next type of fraud, but the problem is that routes, destinations and numbers change - it's a dynamic and ever moving challenge. "Premium rates are a simple number set that can easily (and should) be blocked," he said. "You can keep blacklists but you are always looking for the next thing. You can also block known destinations but customers don't like to be limited. This is where analytics wins. It's dynamic enough to learn and adapt. If the volumes are beyond normal calling patterns you can give the customer the option to cut the traffic. The system is fluid and covers all the different elements and factors that will ultimately protect the end customer."•

UCcert's Managing Director Darren O'Connor is as open and honest as he is fiercely competitive and pragmatic, which along with his customer-first approach is the guarantor of long-term success.

O'Connor first got to grips with the fundamentals of networking during a five year stint in the Royal Signals. Soon after leaving the military he became a Cisco accredited engineer and set off on a path that would lead him to establish Calne-based UCcert in 2008. Prior to the company beginning its commercial life O'Connor had left full-time employment to become a contractor, picking up his own client base along the way. Most notably, O'Connor's first customer was Balfour Beatty, which, unsurprisingly, he rates as a major win, deploying an IP telephony solution and LAN across its key UK sites. "Things have grown leaps and bounds following my first customer," he said. "I haven't looked back since."

O'Connor sticks to what he knows and nailed his flag to Cisco, firstly as a registered partner then moving on to Select. UCcert serves customers in a range of sectors including education, public sector, gaming, financial, construction, retail and manufacturing. "We deliver converged network solutions to businesses but this year we'll be focusing solely on our hosted propositions," he explained. "On-premise still has its place in the market but our clients are seeing the advantages of moving to the cloud. I've closely followed the tech trends from IP telephony to collaboration to virtualisation and now into hosted, it's a constant journey. Cloud networking is an ever changing landscape. On a daily basis new ideas and new ways of working come about and if you don't keep up you are left behind, so I am always researching and looking into what's coming next and how I can advise my clients."

This strategic thought process led to the formation of another important partnership, this time with Channel Telecom. "This came about two years ago," recalled O'Connor. "I was looking for a channel partner that could supply a hosted telephony solution plus data connectivity and Channel Telecom ticked the right boxes. There are many partners on the scene that claim to do the same, but for me it was also about the people."

UCcert capped last year with an award scoop that reflects its ambitions. The company picked up Channel Telecom's 'Fastest Growing Partner of the Year Award', and O'Connor attributed this success in large part to his laser focus on giving customers what they want. "My priority is always my clients," he added. "It's vitally important to ensure that a client is happy and feels that they got what they asked for, so I listen to them and make sure that I develop my offerings to ensure I deliver what they expect and need. For example, we're seeing a big shift to the cloud so we will be focusing on our hosted propositions for the foreseeable future. I strongly believe in not diversifying too much otherwise you risk becoming a jack of all trades. We're proficient in networking and telephony so we'll always lead with these."

Although located in the south west of England UCcert works all over the UK and Europe, and its growth has delivered a dilemma that O'Connor hasn't yet fully resolved. "I'm getting to a point in the business now when I have to hand off some of the work to other people I trust and that I know will do a good job," he added. "However, it's still hard to let go. I need to work on relinquishing control and trusting that others can deliver on my promises. I built UCcert from scratch so I'm conscious of the way that I expect this business to perform, that means every single aspect of it."

As a man of impeccable principles and standards, O'Connor's promise to his customers and family is to 'do the best that I can in the most open and honest way'. "What more can anyone ask of me?", he added. "I'm a family man, so running my own business also gives me the drive to better myself and grow the company."•

In truth, the toll fraud question has been one of the most under-debated industry issues, but in recent times there has been an outbreak of common sense with the sector becoming more articulate in promoting coherent anti-fraud strategies that will help to remake the industry into its own image and gain back control.

ITSPA hopes that the industry and Government will be guided by its newly formed Cyber Crime Task Force, part of a campaign to raise the profile of telephony fraud with Government, the regulator and law enforcement. "We have had some constructive meetings," stated David Cargill (pictured), Chair of ITSPA's Operations Working Group. "ITSPA has also highlighted to policy makers that, for the past five and a half years, Ofcom has had the power to request communications providers to block telephone numbers and withhold out payments for frauds occurring in Europe. However, as far as ITSPA is aware, this power has only been used twice."

Instead of sitting on their hands, the Government, law enforcement and Ofcom must commit more resources to fighting this crime, urged Cargill. "Toll fraud is estimated to add around two per cent to users' bills," he added. "It is highly prevalent in states under suspicion of funding crime and, in some cases, terrorist activities."

ITSPA is encouraging Ofcom to use the power it holds regarding frauds that originate in Europe, and is also calling for Government to recognise telephony fraud more broadly, including measures around the training and education of law enforcement and the public as part of the recently announced Cyber Security Strategy. "It is also essential that the Government works more closely with international governments, regulators and the ITU," stated Cargill. "Close international cooperation will be required to block out payments and finally end the crime. A further potential option for the industry is working with Internet service providers to block scanner traffic."

A survey of 1,000 businesses commissioned by an ITSPA member revealed that 27 per cent of those questioned had been the victim of a telephone hack over the past five years, resulting in the company being billed for calls their employees had not made. The average cost to each business was £12,000. The most common losses came from calls being made via a compromised PBX, calls made from elsewhere using SIP credentials that have been harvested, and calls made from VoIP accounts that have been set up using stolen credit card details. All of these result in losses of revenue for the customer and damage to the customer-supplier relationship.

According to Cargill, if more telecoms suppliers and users report fraud using ITSPA's Fraud Reporting Guidelines the issue will be given more attention and be considered a greater priority by the relevant law enforcement agencies. "Toll fraud can potentially become a thing of the past if security measures are followed by end users, scanning traffic is blocked at the national network or ISP level, and out payments for fraudulent calls are stopped," added Cargill.

This wish list would form the basis of a new order in comms that would see the high cost of toll fraud removed in the UK, currently estimated to be in the region of £953 million. Ben O'Leary, Revenue Assurance Manager at Gamma, agrees that it's the responsibility of all parties to do everything in their power to halt the ongoing cycle of fraud. "All parties need to accept a share in the blame for high levels of fraud," he said. "While clearly the only person truly at fault is the perpetrator, all those involved can do more to limit the potential for, and mitigate, the impact of fraud.

"The regulator has announced that it sees UK revenue share fraud as coming under the AIT process, which is something the industry has been exercising for many years already. But it does not say anything on the subject of fraud across borders or the use of international call forwarding services which are an ever increasing concern in the industry. The Government should be involved in arranging cross-border consensus to put a stop to this flow of money."

The Risk & Assurance Group is currently supporting an initiative led by fraud expert David Morrow to use the Proceeds of Crime Act as a mechanism to prevent the flow of money, even if it would cross borders. "This would be a powerful tool to limit IRSF from UK-based phone systems and the whole industry should offer its support to see that to conclusion," added O'Leary. "This does not mean that law enforcement should stop trying to catch the perpetrators. It is after all a worldwide problem that affects calls arriving in the UK as well as those originating here. It's a joint responsibility."

Gamma has witnessed fraud across a large number of business customers. "The only type of fraud we see in our part of the market is revenue share fraud, either international or UK terminated, but through a number of different means," he explained. "The most common method of fraud seen is PBX hacking. Dial-through fraud is becoming less common as consumers become more wary of the security of voicemail.

"As long as there are insecure phone systems and revenue share generating phone services there will always be scope for fraud. The goal we need to work towards is preventing it from being no consequence free money for those engaging in fraud. As businesses move towards online help desks, perhaps before long there will be no need for revenue generating numbers."

Voiceflex's brand of fraud prevention could be described as aggressive, notably because the company has itself been the victim of a crime to the tune of £25,000. "But the legal fees where £75,000," stated Sales Director Paul Taylor. "We decided it wouldn't happen on our platform again and implemented our fraud reporting tool ABBA (Advanced Behaviour Based Analysis), a multi-level application to detect fraudulent activity and stop it at source.

"We still get hundreds of attacks a week, 90 per cent are stopped within our core application, the remaining 10 per cent via our second and third line defences. I keep being told this is an industry problem. Most SIP carriers have applications within the core to spot fraudulent activity and kill it there and then. I know it's harder with PSTN and ISDN, but perhaps when they are completely finished and we are all SIP or hosted the problem will be mostly removed. If the network and/or telephony application was locked down, you could wipe off 60-70 per cent of the fraud."

Is gaining the upper hand over these criminals realistic? Tollring's Managing Director Tony Martino believes so, having also leveraged technology to good effect with the launch of its new real-time Credit and Fraud Management System (CFMS), which last month went live on BT Wholesale's Hosted Centrex platform. "Self-learning predictive analytics that review real-time trends and update dynamically help us to eliminate fraud before or as it happens," commented Martino.

"The issue is how loud can you shout about the problem of fraud when talking to customers. Everyone wants to hear about incidents and how to prevent them, but at the same time no one is willing to talk about it. Education and awareness is needed but without scaring the end user. The customer needs to understand that fraud management is good for them, it offers a lower cost of ownership and greater flexibility. Using automated and self-learning technology empowers everyone in the food chain to play their part in controlling fraud. The tools need to devolve across partners so they can input and manage their customers closely, which promotes shared responsibility across the whole channel down to site level."•

In setting up Burnley-based MSP Seriun in 2003, Managing Director Justin Sherwood and co-founder Richard Lee were attempting to form a new type of ICT provider.

Every reasonable person accepts the core values contained within Seriun's opening manifesto - to make a difference to businesses by helping them overcome their technical challenges - but few manage to infuse their business strategy with such energy and clarity of vision. "We wanted to do things better by offering the right fit while maintaining a focus on developing innovative solutions," said Sherwood. "We have had a passion for technology since the days of the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad. Some may call us geeks, but our passion has been the driving force behind us going into the ICT industry."

Sherwood was bold in rethinking Seriun's core purpose, and with good reason he quickly realised that the company needed to move from being a micro break-fix operation to a fully managed service provider. "To make the change we invested heavily in systems and resources such as Autotask to manage our service delivery and ISO9001 and ITIL frameworks to demonstrate our high service standards," explained Sherwood. "We then diversified and began offering software solutions as part of the mix, becoming more than just an IT service provider. As we grew, we realised comms and IT were converging so introduced telecoms services into our portfolio and welcomed Alan Scully to the team as Director of Communications."

To manage growth, Sherwood also recognised the need to re-set the structure of the business while being particularly sensitive to the implications of a transition from an owner-manager style company to having a management team in place to focus on the MSP strategy. "Our focus has been on implementing a management structure and developing a systemised approach to delivering our products and services," he added. "Our current priority is growth. However, because the market is fragmented and we have such a diverse offering from telecoms to IT systems, with bespoke software development in between, our challenge is knowing where to focus our efforts and investment."

Seriun has already invested in human resources, improved processes, efficiencies and systems. This has enabled the directors to work strategically 'on' the business instead of 'in' it. "We also invested in developing our marketing and sales strategy," added Sherwood. "This set our growth plan into motion."

Seriun's markets are diverse, mainly small and medium businesses with some larger enterprise level clients such as Betfred and Castle Metals. "We are growing our presence in the education sector and currently developing some offerings resulting from the digital transformation that is sweeping across the industry," added Sherwood. "We are also working on gaining more medium-sized customers as our proposition is suited to that level of the market."

Sherwood noted that plans are in place to grow Seriun's resource base to service revenue growth. The company currently has a headcount of 20, and turnover for year end October 2016 was £1.6 million with projected turnover this year of £2.3 million. "Our overall target is to reach £3 million next year," stated Sherwood. "We have also set our sights on an acquisition. It will be challenging to integrate the new team and maximise on the synergies. However, our investment in people and process should help us."

Sherwood believes that these investments will give Seriun a strong hand of cards. The company can now impose its presence in emerging markets and orchestrate a strategy around new areas of interest. "Our vision is to embrace machine learning and AI to improve efficiencies and increase autonomy," explained Sherwood. "This sounds like science fiction, but the reality is that in an increasingly connected and competitive global economy, transforming businesses to embrace this is critical. It could be the next revolution."

Sherwood has also invested heavily in remote management and monitoring as part of Seriun's evolution from a break-fix company to a fully managed service provider. "This has allowed us to proactively service our customers' systems," he commented. "We are alerted immediately to a potential issue and often solve the matter before impacting productivity. We are looking to evolve this into monitoring critical services and not just for binary up or down time."

Seriun's focus on innovation has been carried over to the realm of Business Intelligence and analytics with the creation of Intellistream for O2, which so far has been rolled out to 25 of its UK stores. "The next step is to take the concept of gathering retail data and enhance this by adding other streams of Big Data," noted Sherwood. "This will be evolved into a platform for analytics that will ultimately provide deeper and more meaningful insights into performance and efficiencies."

The only route to future proofing his business is to fully engage with what Sherwood believes to be the biggest industry trend for years - digital transformation. "Second to that is convergence and commoditisation of IT and telecoms," he added. "Systems as a Service is paving the way for this and managed services can reduce the risk to outsourcing. The market is becoming services oriented and the next big revolution is IoT, Big Data and AI, connecting devices even further and consuming the data via systems that help us understand and garner intelligent insights.

"The major players are leading the curve here with the smaller service providers delivering these big epics to their SME customers in a meaningful and consultative way. We'll see an increase in market consolidation and I still believe there is room for a leading brand. We're confident that our offering will steer us and help us stand out in the marketplace."

Sherwood's desire to be centre stage has not been over stated in the content of this article so far, even though he displayed a flair for stage-work as a child. But when he lost his footing and fell off set as a young extra in the 1987 film Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, leading lady Sharon Stone bought him two ice creams to make things better. What a treat! Sherwood has since gone from acting with the 80s sex bomb film star to fulfilling the role of a current day rising star with a secure foothold on the comms stage where staying power is assured and success in new markets a stone's throw away.

Racing back again, this time to 2001, and Sherwood moved to the UK from Zimbabwe after completing a digital electronics diploma and Microsoft certification. He began working for a computer company in Clitheroe, and a few years later decided he could do it better and approached Richard Lee who was working part-time while at university to see if he wanted to start-up a company.

"The rest is history," stated Sherwood. "My biggest personal achievement in my career has been the move from a technical role to a managerial leadership role within the business. To help me make the transition I completed a part-time MBA while managing Seriun. It was a challenge and a huge achievement and couldn't have been done without the support of the team, family and friends. I'm pleased to say it's paid dividends as it helped develop my critical thinking and overall business strategy."

But nobody can legislate for hindsight, and looking back in the rear view mirror Sherwood sees that two elements of his early strategy might have been executed differently to accelerate growth. "I could have approached things with an objective viewpoint, applied some critical thinking and realised that there may well be better ways of doing something away from my own subjective opinions," he commented. "And looking for financial support at the start-up stage may have provided the resources we needed to adopt a faster growth strategy."

The difference now is that Sherwood is moving Seriun along far more swiftly while riding the wave of convergence that is shifting the market towards SIs and managed service providers as demand for integrated systems and services increases. "I relish getting businesses to think differently about ICT and to see it as a transformative value activity with a return," said Sherwood. "We all get excited when we see the value that technology can bring to our customers."•

In refusing to recognise personal limits, Cloud Direct CEO Brett Raynes's direction of travel is always going to be towards the top.

Raynes, a master of self-discipline, proves beyond doubt that human beings are born with extraordinary potential. So much so that if we were to apply the theory of Darwinian natural selection to forecasting the outcome of his strategic and personal regime, it is very likely that Cloud Direct will arrive somewhere at the top of the food chain. And the role of tinned mackerel in this scenario would not be insignificant. With a wry smile, Raynes admits that eating the fish for lunch every day is his greatest career achievement. But joking aside, this unwavering health regime is a piscatorial reflection of his strong mental attitude, determination and resilience, all key requirements to succeed in business.

"I like to test my self discipline and stamina," he stated. "I keep myself fit on a daily basis with cycling and running. In recent years I've wind surfed the coast of Brazil in a 500km 'down-winder', completed an Iron Man, cycled from John o' Groats to Land's End, and possibly reached my edge finishing the Marathon des Sables, which is 156 miles across the Sahara Desert in extreme temperatures and contours. Discovery Channel calls it 'the toughest foot race on earth', and completing this challenge underpins my personal and business ethos that 'more is in you'. I believe that everyone can do more and be greater than they think possible. For me, the measure of that is the transformation that can happen for our customers and in the careers of our staff."

Raynes's brand of leadership is not embodied in one person, it is expressed through his company's staff and departments as an all-pervasive and thriving culture. "'More is in you' sums up the ethos that permeates the business, from a personal development point of view and in how we can help our customers build better businesses," explained Raynes. "We have lots of company perks, sporty, foodie and social occasions, but we never take our eye off personal development. In everything we do I like to think we follow our five principles of mutuality, quality, efficiency, responsibility and freedom."

Turning to matters of strategy, Raynes's watchwords 'cloud first' are also loaded with significance. "The move to the cloud is a journey, so it's important that we remain agile over time," he said. "For our customers, we want them to know that they're in safe hands. Our original focus was on back-up, disaster recovery and general cloud services surrounding all areas of communications and infrastructure. But with our recent acquisitions our skills and capacity have sprinted ahead. We can now offer customers more depth and breadth of services alongside strong technical capabilities as well as on-premises support which we didn't offer before. We're now catering for more hybrid needs."

The lesson emerging from Raynes's passionate and deep-seated conviction in his motto 'more is in you' is that anything is truly possible if you put your mind to it. The watchwords also display a deep instinct for survival based on achieving long-term goals. "We want to hit the £100 million mark in five years time, both through organic growth and our buy and build acquisition strategy," said Raynes. "We exited 2016 at £9 million and will hit £20 million during 2017. Our plan is to continue that pattern exponentially. We already have four more acquisitions in the pipeline."

Last month Cloud Direct bagged its fifth IT business in 20 months, snapping up Connect Support Services. The deal follows Cloud Direct's acquisition of AlwaysOn and brings 300 more customers to its base along with additional Microsoft skills in Azure, Office 365 and hosted desktop. Previous acquisitions include Redblade in July 2016, ihotdesk in December 2015 and Datel Business Systems in June 2015.

Cloud Direct now has a headcount of circa 170 staff based in Bath, Bracknell, London and Cape Town, South Africa. This shows how far the company has travelled since it was founded by Raynes in 2003 to make cloud technology accessible to small and mid-size organisations so they could grow and compete against the big guns by being more agile and more productive.

"In 2014, after 11 years demonstrating year-on-year growth, we decided the time was right to seek outside investment to accelerate our growth through acquisitions," noted Raynes. "At that point we secured private equity investment from Saracens rugby club owner Nigel Wray, along with Rob Giles and Jamie Brooke, as well as the West of England LEP Going for Growth fund and Santander Bank. Our two acquisitions just after the New Year were helped by a further £5 million investment from Beechbrook Capital."

Prior to setting up Cloud Direct, Raynes spent ten years founding and running technology businesses in the UK, France and Germany, one of which he sold to a NASDAQ quoted business. He holds degrees in engineering and marketing, while a Cranfield University Business Growth programme still informs his approach to business. "I continue to challenge myself and grow personally by studying Chinese or music, for example," added Raynes. "Perspective, creativity, adaptability and application are all important in growing and driving a business."

Business leaders are obliged to lead, but how they lead is a matter of choice. Raynes's method, outlined above, is augmented by his ability to stay in touch with his inner font of ambition and drive, and to not allow a transient moment of massive achievement blind him to the need for keeping going. "As the cloud industry continues to mature we're aware that we need to grow and stay ahead of that curve to avoid being part of the 'squeezed middle', such as you see happening with many small to medium sized businesses," he added.

"We have three practice areas that centre solutions around what the customer needs on their journey to the cloud - backup with business continuity and security; front office productivity solutions including Office 365, Skype, Dynamics and SharePoint; and infrastructure solutions including hosted desktops and applications. In each area we will continue to increase our capabilities."

Cloud Direct is a Microsoft Gold Cloud Solutions Provider for the small to mid-size market in hosting and Skype for Business, and Raynes hinted at what he sees as 'huge possibilities' in getting close to Microsoft. "We're making big strides in driving the Azure platform and Office 365, especially Skype for Business," added Raynes. "Having a partner like Microsoft with Azure and Office 365 steers our business. The cloud opportunity is immense. Azure alone is growing at 140 per cent per year."

Also capturing the imagination is the emergence of analytics, on which Raynes speaks with a convincing passion. "The ease with which a customer can gain insight into their own business using tools such as PowerBI is amazing," said Raynes. "The potential of machine learning and AI is also mind boggling. Practical applications for our customers are a little way off, but we're starting to experiment. For example, combining voice-to-text engines with sentiment analysis techniques to predict the results of customer support calls. I am only just realising how our own know-how and automation can be captured in tools that drive down costs, improve productivity and ensure quality as we grow. Channel players who rely on lead flow from vendors or make important margin off licensing will struggle. They have to build solutions with their own IP attached." •