Hosted UC specialist thevoicefactory is in full production mode according to Sales Director Paul Harrison who has manufactured a strong pedigree in advancing the market for hosted solutions.
Taking a new start-up to a five-year-old business with global reselling partners delivering a range of applications has been an 'interesting and challenging' journey, noted Harrison, who aims to build one of the strongest brands in the UK comms sector. His first move into telecoms came in 1998 when he headed up Nortel Networks' CVX Dial up business in EMEA. The offering was an advanced modem bank with sizeable customers such as AOL and Freeserve. "The solution quickly developed and in early 1999 we trialled it with BT Spain and delivered one of the first VoIP solutions," said Harrison. "In 2002 I joined hosted platform vendor Netcentrex as Sales Director for Northern Europe targeting the service provider market to deliver hosted telephony, mainly using protocols H.323 and MGCP with SIP being a distant third protocol."
Following a three year stint selling hosted telephony platforms to Eirecom, Inclarity and a number of Nordic service providers Harrison joined BroadSoft in 2005 as its Northern Europe and Middle East VP Sales. "I was the third BroadSoft employee in Europe and set about selling the BroadSoft platform to every main service provider including TDC, Etisalat and a number of UK providers including thevoicefactory in 2009," he explained.
thevoicefactory was incorporated in 2008 and a year later funding was in place. "We purchased a full BroadSoft solution with Acme Packet Session Border Controllers," said Harrison. "A technical lead was hired with BroadSoft experience and the platform was built. The solution went live in Q1/2010. And in June 2010 I joined direct from BroadSoft as the Sales Director and share holder. In 2012 the principle investor was bought out and the debt repaid. I then became the principle shareholder."
Over the past 18 months thevoicefactory has witnessed 370 per cent growth in new business and has expanded the technical team from three to eight and relocated to new offices to accommodate growth. "Our full indirect model, based on working with large reselling partners, has seen our growth extend from the UK to mainland Europe and beyond," added Harrison. "Revenue has doubled in the past months and we see this growth continuing. The foundations have been laid and selected partners are delivering. It's all about having the solution at the right time, and that time is now. IP telephony and SIP are now widely accepted. The connectivity has become more affordable and businesses are moving key services to the cloud. We see a majority of new RFPs requesting hosted.
"The challenges we see with the channel is a lack of understanding about the hosted market and also the benefits of the technology. We are careful to pick our partners and ensure they can support the customer by bringing out the advantages of hosted UC rather than competing on price."
Harrison's channel proposition offers a full white label solution with no chains and allows partners to bring their brand to the end customer. "Our partners can also choose their connectivity, IP phones for their customers and if required bring their own carrier for the minutes," added Harrison. "We are seeing larger service providers signing up to resell our solutions as hosted telephony becomes mainstream."
The firm's customer base has moved from SME to mid-market with a mix of SIP trunking and hosted telephony across these sectors. Harrison is also seeing strong growth in verticals such as energy, hospitality and automotive. He says that traditional PBX solutions no longer meet their requirements. Although hosted telephony has not been widely adopted in certain verticals such as hospitality and energy, thevoicefactory is engaged in these markets with customers already live on its platform. "Telephone solutions used to be a revenue generator but now they are a cost," said Harrison. "Our expectations for this market are huge. It is the last stand for PBX vendors as they fight to the bitter end to protect this vertical. Let the battle commence."
thevoicefactory's strategy is to deliver a full UC solution where telephony control and usage also moves onto the desktop as an application. The benefit to the enterprise is to improve productivity and be agnostic to the device. "Nearly all mid-market customers joining thevoicefactory require this integration, and our real-time reporting solution provides an answer to the question, 'do you want to know what you don't know'," commented Harrison.
Aside from keeping an eye on market developments Harrison is also tracking the development of WebRTC which provides the ability to communicate with rich services such as video from any browser at any location. "Video has always been delivered on a closed network or poorly on a solution adopted by businesses such as Skype," added Harrison. "We see WebRTC has a key part to our service offering in the future."
Moving forward, it will also be about market segmentation, believes Harrison. "The cheap guys will look to get market share and be disruptive, but thevoicefactory and partners will be offering service quality and feature rich solutions," he commented. "I believe the winners will be the providers who can offer a reliable solution with excellent support coupled with a 'fit for future' solution."•