Comms Dealer

In his passion for giving customers what they really want and need, Steffan Dancy, Managing Director at Rydal Communications, has built an award winning business.

Dancy owes much of his business success to the attributes he acquired during a promising soccer career that was curtailed at the age of 23 following an injury. "This did, however, instil the ethos of winning, working as a team and delivering to the best of your ability, which today exudes through the Rydal Comms office," he said.

Dancy was first exposed to telecoms through an independent mobile airtime reseller, an acquaintance that inspired him to pursue a new opportunity. Rydal Communications was incorporated in 2008 and started trading in 2009 from a bedroom where Dancy ran the operation on his own. "After two years I decided that it was time to grow," he stated. "I moved to a small office and recruited Stephen Watkins who is our Operations Director and Mark Worraker our Sales Team Leader. As a team we were heavily focused around mobile, and in 2012 we embarked on the broadband, calls and lines and hosted system market."

Today, the company has a 23-strong headcount and is a specialist at delivering unified solutions in accordance with its growth strategy. Another big turning point was gaining access to funds. "Once we understood where the market was going we invested money in expanding," noted Dancy. "This has heavily paid off and further re-investment from myself will come over the following months to position us for the next phase of growth. Our turnover run rate is currently £2.5 million, up from £1.78 million last year. We have consistently delivered year-on-year growth and our intention is to achieve £5 million turnover within the next three years and £10 million within five years."

An important part of Rydal Communications' business plan is its relationship with Ericsson-LG and Pragma. Rydal scooped their 2016 New Partner of the Year award in February in recognition of its sales and delivery success. Dancy credits Ericsson-LG's flagship products in registering high sales and he is already making inroads with the vendor's new cloud solution launched earlier this year. Rydal's target market is businesses with 10-250 extensions but it also boasts a handful of enterprise clients including Change.ORG, Multi-York Furniture store and a recent contract win from Deafblind UK.

IT and energy also feature prominently in Dancy's longer-term plans. "We already offer elements of bespoke IT services but will have a sharper focus on these areas over the coming 12 months," he added. "The convergence of comms and IT is growing stronger. Our main priority is managing the fibre pipe that goes into the business and everything that sits on it, including IT. Further growth may come from acquisitions. However, this will happen when the right opportunity comes across our path."

Following a growth plan is not always plain sailing and Dancy's biggest challenge is ensuring that the business has the right systems, processes and management structure in place to deliver sustainable growth. "Over the past 12 months we have focused on building the right team to implement our strategy," he said.

"We have been, and still are, investing in our people with a key focus on training all of our staff, including the management team. Focusing on our people has resulted in a huge improvement in the business over the last year. Service delivery to our end users is better, slicker and more organised. In hindsight, I would have invested in the right CRM systems and built a support structure around our sales team earlier. Many small businesses make the same mistake of having sales people do far too much."

How best to manage workloads is a question Dancy himself was forced to address on a personal level. "I used to work every hour under the sun, consistently 8am-8pm for three years and started to burn out," he commented. "Someone older and wiser told me to remember one thing in life, 'health before wealth, otherwise you spend your wealth getting your health back'. This really stuck with me and made me make changes to the hours I was working.

"I realised that to grow, I couldn't do it on my own. I needed to invest my time into others and allow them to spread their wings. Letting go of your business is hard to do, especially when you have built it up from nothing. For me it got to the point where I had no choice. Thanks to the people we have here it's been a blessing in disguise."•

With skills in short supply, the industry must ask what the future holds for technology businesses. The answer? A telecoms apprenticeship scheme run by the Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP), explains Head of Operations Crissi Williams.

Back in 2013 we identified the need for a telecoms specific apprenticeship scheme. Having researched the idea with our members we found that 100 per cent would, in an ideal world, employ apprentices if they could. We also discovered, however, that the biggest barriers to taking on apprentices included the administration required, time constraints, staff resources and access to training. In fact, at that time it was only the larger organisations that were in a position to employ apprentices.

Since then, we have successfully created more than 60 jobs in the industry through the scheme, ranging from engineers to technical helpdesk advisors. Through this initiative we are not only offering young people a chance to start their careers, but also providing telecoms businesses a headache-free way to find the fresh new talent they need, whether large or small.

It is currently now better value than ever for employers to take on young apprentices, with the Government recently announcing the abolition of employer national insurance contributions for apprentices under the age of 25. While those perceived barriers first identified in our survey of 2013 still remain for some, they don't have to. Our scheme takes care of the time-consuming elements for businesses who are keen to take on apprentices, but are not sure where to start.

Our apprentices are supported throughout the programme with further training and development opportunities. One of the most valuable elements is the mentoring scheme. Each apprentice is matched with a mentor, giving them unique access to a senior telecoms professional. We have found this not only drives motivation, but gives them access to unique insights and networking opportunities with peers they may never have met otherwise. It has also proven to be a valuable experience from the mentor's perspective too, with many telling us that they gain a real insight into the challenges faced by young people entering our industry - something which can help with their own training and HR strategy.

With the heavy financial burden bearing down on young people going to university, opportunities to 'earn as you learn' are becoming ever more attractive. This is demonstrated in the rise of sites like www.notgoingtouni.com and more than 45k Twitter followers to the National Apprenticeship Service. What's more, during this year's National Apprenticeship Week, 30,000 employers across the country pledged to create apprenticeship roles. We are working to close the gap between education and work by offering an alternative to university, where often graduates are still not 'work ready' after completing their studies. The apprenticeship route gives young people the skills, training and knowledge they need to be work ready by the time they have completed their apprenticeship.

The forthcoming Apprenticeship Levy, coming into effect in April 2017, will undoubtedly change the apprenticeship landscape. It will install a 0.5 per cent tax on companies with a wage bill of more than £300 million, but will affect SMEs too as companies with a lesser wage bill will be able to draw from the fund. The response to the levy has been mixed. Some see it as a way of increasing the quality of placements across the country, while others argue it could force businesses to look at quantity rather than quality. Our advice would be to get ahead of the game and start employing apprentices now, and to engage with your payroll software provider now to ascertain how the money will be taken and avoid any potential hiccups.

Ultimately, apprenticeships are vital to the development of the industry. Not only do they bring fresh talent, but greater staff retention and more tailored skills. We continue to welcome two full cohorts per year to our programme, and hope to see this grow over the next few years - creating more telecoms jobs.

Awards programme

The ITP's Apprentice of the Year awards programme was launched to help exceptional apprentices stand out from the crowd, and recognise their hard work and commitment. It also gives the young people a confidence boost and looks great on their CV. Past winners have told us that it has really helped their career prospects.

An important element of our awards programme is the Chris Seymour Women in Telecoms award, launched to recognise the outstanding contribution that women make to the sector, despite still being in the minority. Women currently make up under 30 per cent of the ICT workforce, and only 15.5 per cent of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce. According to a report from the Select Committee on Digital Skills, increasing the number of women working in IT and telecoms could generate an extra £2.6 billion each year.

The University and Colleges Admissions Service found that in 2014, 17,300 more men than women entered computer science, and 20,300 more men entered engineering. In both of these fields men made up over 85 per cent of acceptances. Lack of careers guidance and education are noted as the main stumbling blocks, something we hope to address in the telecoms sector. This information shows that more needs to be done to address the imbalance within our industry.

Nathalie Vafiadis, Director of Technology Delivery at EE and winner of The Chris Seymour Award for Women in Telecoms in 2015, said: "If you look at the engineering side of telecoms it is dominated by men, and many times throughout my career I've been the only woman in the room during meetings. It's a fact that women are under-represented in this industry. Yet I haven't ever focused on gender during my career and have just concentrated on doing the best job I can in whatever role I'm doing.

"The Chris Seymour Award for Women in Telecoms demonstrates that women can have successful careers in comms. My aspiration is that within the next generation, Chris Seymour's wonderful award will be changing its name because there will no longer be a need to limit it by gender. The industry will have moved on significantly and women in senior positions across the telecoms industry will be the norm.

"We absolutely need to tell young women as they're growing up that there's no reason they can't be involved in this industry. A successful career in any field should be an output of the passion and energy you put into it. That's why mentoring schemes are very important. They help to develop an individual's belief and ultimately drive the end result. It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman. We want the telecoms industry to be filled with enthusiastic people focused on delivering an exceptional service to customers.

"We're living in a technological age and all children are growing up using technology as second nature, so there's every reason to be encouraged about more women developing an interest in technology and moving into engineering-based industries like telecoms and ultimately achieving their full career potential."•

Key points

• The ITP's apprenticeship scheme has created more than 60 jobs in the industry and continues to seek out companies and employees who wish to take part.
• Now is a better time than ever to take on apprentices before the introduction of the levy and due to the abolition of the employer national insurance contributions.
• The ITP can provide access to training, professional registration and mentoring.
www.theitp.org

The gulf between go-getting comms resellers and their more static counterparts is widening. Most industry players accept that they need to engage in product and service diversification to prosper, and business success is naturally drawn to those, like Calteq, that press ahead with these progressive strategies, according to co-founder and Director Mike Stephenson.

Stephenson co-founded Calteq with Nigel Willets in 2003. Their intention was simple - to provide great customer service with a product offering to match. "During our previous years working for shareholders we learnt the importance of taking time to understand a client's challenges and provide a bespoke solution rather than the all too familiar 'one size fits all' approach often taken by larger corporates," noted Stephenson.

Stephenson's pre-Calteq experience enables him to deal with large customers and carriers, which has been intrinsic to Calteq's success as a provider of tailored solutions to sizeable multiple site customers using Tier 1 carriers. He first entered the comms industry in 1987 as a telemarketer for sales appointments at Solutions Telecom, a telephone system dealer. After securing a number of successful appointments he was promoted to a sales role selling systems and smart boxes using Mercury Communications. He then moved to system manufacturer Tie Communications and in 1992 joined Telia UK as Sales Manager. Breaking away from this role Stephenson co-founded IDN which floated on AIM in 2000 and was sold to Redstone Telecom in 2006. During this period Calteq was established.

Today, the company has three offices, one focused on mobile, the other data services while the head office operates as an administration centre. From these secure footholds Calteq targets large multi-site customers, in particular those using traditional voice services such as ISDN30 and are ripe for migrating to hosted and SIP solutions, supported by mobile and data products. "While it's still not for everyone, with ISDN30 heading towards end of life we want to drive this message to our customers and offer them a smooth transition," said Stephenson. "We are always looking for products that can be sold into our customer base. These currently include IoT and M2M solutions which have opened up new markets and opportunities."

To expand its product and services range Calteq purchased a small, but specialised, data company two years ago. The acquired data products and Cisco expertise allowed Calteq to offer data services to its customer base, which is now a thriving part of the business and generates almost £1.5 million annual turnover. The acquisition also enabled Calteq to approach SIP and hosted IP at a much higher level, with good success having sold 2,000 hosted seats already this year compared to 400 at the same time last year.

Calteq's focus on data solutions includes private WAN, colocation facilities and advanced data products such as Sophos firewall deployment. "With security front of mind among all of our customers we are developing our portfolio to include solutions that both alert and protect from call fraud," added Stephenson. "We have also refocused on mobiles using Vodafone and O2 and achieved a 200 per cent increase in mobile connections over the last 12 months. Combined billing and account management have been critical to this growth."

Stephenson cited one company as a good example of its broad solution portfolio in action, the Timpson Group which consists of Timpson, Max Spielmann, Snappy Snaps and others. "We provided landlines, mobiles and data connections which are currently being rolled out via a private WAN to 1,500 branches," he stated. "This has saved the customer a huge amount of money and introduced a streamlined route for new shop openings and fault reporting. The core solutions include additional support products such as conference calling, automated fraud detection, automated fault logging and comprehensive engineer support for installation of lines into all of the main supermarket chains in the UK."

To bolster its sales and support capabilities Calteq has invested significantly in up-skilling its call centre and sales channels, empowering them to sell more advanced data products and supporting solutions. This approach also feeds into the company's culture which Stephenson describes as 'innovative, supportive and hard working', and he welcomes a melting pot of new ideas. "We encourage the team to input ideas because they are our greatest strength, whether it's going the extra mile in our 24/7 customer service operation or developing solutions to protect our customers from fraud," he explained. "We also like to have fun and always reward great work."•

Comms and IT marketing specialist Blabbermouth has rolled out a 'Transformation Initiative' designed to optimise the sales and marketing performance of businesses in the channel.

Blabbermouth's MD Elizabeth Sparrow (pictured) said the initiative responds to a lack of integration between the sales and marketing functions of many businesses, stunting their ability to realise their full selling potential.

To put things right, Sparrow said Blabbermouth's business transformation process begins with a company health check, strategic planning, discussions about the true nature of a company, its identity, growth ambitions and long-term goals."We then put in place a joined up marketing campaign to deliver new opportunities," she explained.

"But this is only part of the solution. No department should operate in isolation, especially sales and marketing which go hand in hand."

Blabbermouth plans to position businesses for growth by preparing them for seamless customer acquisition, and the man at the centre of the company's new campaign is incoming consultant David Sparrow who joins from TalkTalk Business where he was Head of Corporate and Enterprise Sales and played a leading part in the creation of this high performing division.

Previous roles include notable stints at reseller Freedom Communications, Virgin Media and T-Mobile. His main purpose is to help sales and marketing leaders escape from the straitjacket of siloed working by creating more scope for professional chemistry between departments.

"Business assessments can often be complex and sensitive," he commented. "But we provide a tactful and uncomplicated review of capabilities, processes, structures and strategies within the sales department before establishing best practices and integrating these with the marketing effort.

"Our aim is to assist a variety of businesses with their growth plans and help them unlock new market potential and large flagship opportunities.

"The best businesses are those rooted not in a fractured departmental mode of operation but in a unified framework based on joint targets, measurements and processes that maximise on the benefits of sales and marketing integration."

Blabbermouth's auditing and assessment know-how also enables it to report back on the complete customer journey.

Each of UC's incarnations have been stepping stones towards the ‘third phase of convergence', according to Six Degrees Group's (6DG) Strategy and Marketing Director Campbell Williams, who says it's high time we all went ‘UCeamless'.

The traditional language of Unified Communications signifies an environment where users collaborate on any device, any where. But the shift away from this application-centric realm of communications towards a more platform-centric one indicates a trend towards greater levels of integration as the technology blends invisibly into the background of everyday corporate life, while collaborative outcomes move to the fore.

According to Williams, customer demand is driving this convergence of UC, a new incarnation of the category, where the channel delivers UC software on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platforms. "Frost & Sullivan noted that the need to support a growing mobile workforce alongside the ability to gain faster access to advanced features and capabilities are a strong driver for the market," stated Williams. "Customer demand and feedback are now at the forefront of UC&C development."

The UC discussion has shifted more towards people and the human factor rather than technology, device and location. This is a trend Williams has witnessed across ICT as a whole. "As customers insist on more from their technology, be that comms, compute, or cloud, IT has become more specialised and there has been an increase in demand for highly skilled people behind these systems," he stated. "ICT now needs people with specific and focused experience, especially in relation to cloud technologies.

"Businesses have experienced a shift in resources away from traditional IT teams, who as one IT leader put it, ‘don't have the manpower to baby sit hardware any more'. This change means that IT teams need to understand both the scope for technology to deliver the infrastructure and services their business needs, and how to use it when it's in place. IT teams also need to translate business planning and strategic product and service objectives into real world delivery, and overcome long standing barriers between IT and business."

IT leaders also need to understand that UC is more about the technologies while collaboration signifies the outcomes. "UC can do justice to the ongoing evolution of technology and services in the marketplace today," commented Williams. "However, to enhance customer services and business processes, collaboration is more important than all of the technologies available in the marketplace.

"I don't necessarily disagree with the premise that the industry has entered a post-UC era. I think of it as a third phase of comms convergence. Over the years the comms industry has seen a huge number of changes. When VoIP emerged over 15 years ago, many industry players dismissed it as a fad. Now, we don't even know we are using integrated VoIP systems. This shows how far we have come.

"VoIP was followed by ‘Voice over IT', which delivered PBXs using standard computer platforms. Despite the obvious appeal of this type of convergence many commentators were sceptical, arguing PBXs would always need turnkey hardware. Now, I believe we are entering a third phase where customer demand is at the forefront and organisations look to converge their communications and deliver cloud-based UC software on IaaS platforms."

Successful UC players, noted Williams, display flexibility and shy away from selling off-the-shelf solutions. They differentiate themselves by adding customisation and building APIs into customers' key business systems. Because of this, Williams believes that the term ‘UCeamless' is perhaps more suitable than plain UC.

"Traditional fixed line and IPT sellers will need to have a converged mobile strategy, and quickly," he added. "In the mid-market there has been a large focus on SIP and hosted IPX migration, but the mobile costs have always been associated with an independent mobile operator or service provider. The BT/EE tie up should, in time, start making more customers look to consolidate their mobile and voice to one supplier. So there is a great opportunity for the channel to increase the wallet share of their existing customer base."

Following the recent launch of 6DG's UCaaS solution with Avaya, the company plans to bolster its proposition with the CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) and VaaS (Video as a Service) add-on applications. "These will increase the functionality of our UCaaS platform and enable customers to pick and choose from a wider range of features," commented Williams. "We also plan to invest in further expanding our international foot print, closely aligning the next phase of our UCaaS offering with the growth plans of our customer base."

A 22% increase in SV9100 sales secured Trust Distribution the NEC Top UNIVERGE SV9100 Distributor award at the vendor's EMEA Partner Conference 2016 staged in Venice.

Terry Ambrose, joint Trust MD, commented: "Our double digit growth can be attributed in part to the wrap around resource that we have built into the brand. We have sales account managers, a fully trained technical team, two brand managers and regular marketing updates that deliver vital information, along with commercial and technical assistance to our customers.

"This means that they can confidently go out and sell the platform in the knowledge that they are kept abreast of all the latest NEC news and that they will be supported in a a pre and post-sales capacity." 

Yealink has announced enhanced interoperability with Microsoft Skype for Business for three new desktop phones - the entry-level T40P, the Gigabit phone T42G and the Gigabit colour phone T46G.

These models join the T48G which was already qualified for Skype for Business.

Yealink Vice President Stone Lu said: "Each solution is designed to integrate seamlessly with users' workflows and to enhance their productivity."

The phone series supports Skype for Business server functionality including features like conferencing and boss/admin as well as flexible switching between Skype for Business desktop clients and Yealink phones with the wireless Better Together over Ethernet (BToE) function.

Active Digital won two national awards at the UK Employee Experience Awards 2016, held on Wednesday 4th May at the Park Plaza Riverbank in London.

Active Digital won its first awards in the 'Business Change or Transformation' category and the other, which was sector specific, for 'Technology and Telecoms'.

Managing Director Richard Groves stated: "At Active Digital, we understand that a happy, empowered and motivated workforce is a productive one. There is clear research that proves highly engaged employees converts to happier customers. Deploying our new employee app was a team effort and employees were able to share their input to make this a fantastic tool within their work."

International workplace technology firm Condeco Software has acquired myVRM, a New York-based software company with workflow automation expertise in video collaboration, content sharing, unified communications, virtual meetings and analytics.

Condeco provides integrated hardware and software solutions and the myVRM platform streamlines the process of setting up audio, video, content sharing and virtual meetings.

myVRM's platform currently integrates with Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Polycom, Pexip, Vidyo and others systems, creating a simplified solution which will accelerate Condeco's speed to market and drive greater adoption among users.

Paul Statham, founder and CEO of Condeco, said: "For over ten years Condeco has strived to be a people-centric company, developing advanced workplace technology which makes a difference to people's working life. This new combined offering will offer business value to our clients and be a great addition to Condeco's enterprise solution.

"This move will provide the scale to underpin our continued global expansion, which has seen us achieve over 40% growth in 2015."

Ken Scaturro, president of myVRM, added: "The combined platform will enable users to engage in much more complex scenarios, and will give organisations simple and intuitive end-to-end management of people, processes, real estate and technology. We share Condeco's vision of the workplace of the future and are excited to join their team."

Channel Telecom is set to launch Nimbus UC, a new white labelled hosted platform to be unveiled on June 15th at a location in London.

Channel Telecom MD Clifford Norton said: "The move towards cloud-based technology is nothing new. It has been happening for some years now but it has been a while since something came along and shook things up. That is exactly what we are hoping to do with Nimbus UC. 

"Partners will be impressed by its capabilities but more so by its pricing, which gets increasingly competitive the bigger the customer. We have managed to lower costs, increase profit margins while maintaining the features of a premium product."