Hosted telecoms brand 'eve' represents a new dawn for 9 partners, claims Director Adam Cathcart, who led the company's ninth accreditation session this month bringing the number of partners authorised to resell the bespoke Mitel-based hosted platform to 50-plus.
"eve is now making a name for herself in the UK having made a big and lasting impression in the Nordic region," stated Cathcart.
Sitting under the Telepo brand, which is owned by Mitel, eve (exceptional voice everywhere) is being introduced to the channel by 9 as the Canadian vendor's UK launch partner.
"We've taken the Telepo platform and transformed it to create the eve proposition and expanded feature set, all enabled by our own portal and secured by our infrastructure, which we have developed and built from scratch," added Cathcart. "Our objective with eve is to position 9 higher up the food chain."
9 has sold over 10,000 hosted seats over the past few years but the company recognised that to grow its market share it needed a more flexible offering, so 9 decided to invest in developing its own solution.
"Our close relationship with Mitel enabled us to secure the UK launch partner role for its Telepo platform, which we have since developed, expanded and refined to give birth to eve," said Cathcart.
"In developing and expanding the platform and portal we've created a disruptive and individual brand and support proposition."
The project was supported by a near £2m investment in the platform and network infrastructure, along with a full-time team of five developers and network engineers who have been working on eve for well over two years, assisted by product management, marketing and operational teams.
"The platform is located in a global standard data centre with dual resilience and multiple failover to ensure reliability, security and resilience," explained Cathcart.
"Our objective is to provide a robust alternative to the me too hosted propositions which currently hold sway.
"eve is disruptive, abundantly featured and easy to work with, and we have ambitious growth plans that will see us challenge the current dominant providers for the market share podium before the end of next year.
"Partner feedback on our platform and accreditation programme has been very positive, and the opportunity to deliver something different to their customers has also appealed to partners."