Vapour Media is pumping high octane gas into the tanks of resellers on the drive towards cloud territory, according to Tim Mercer, co-founder and Director.
Mercer has no role models to speak of, his heroes operate anonymously in the Forces. And during a six year stint as a soldier himself Mercer served in the first Gulf War and toured Northern Ireland. He witnessed first-hand how the resolve of highly trained people working together can really make a difference to the world. "I take my hat off to those guys every day," he said. "They keep us safe in our beds."
It is with a similar spirit of camaraderie and mutual trust that Mercer advances his channel-centric strategy, and his ethos is paying off handsomely. "We work with resellers to build relationships that last, keeping them up to date with new and emerging technologies such as the cloud and ensuring they are fully trained on each of our products" commented Mercer.
New partners of all shapes and sizes, from the traditional telecom sector and the IT channel, are joining Vapour by the week. "We are signing up partners from a number of sectors and helping them sell data networks and cloud voice services with SaaS," added Mercer. "Our focus is to make Vapour a major player in the channel for data cloud voice and SaaS services. Our priorities revolve around customer service. We aim to deliver a quality customer experience with great pricing, focusing on customer retention and satisfaction. If we do our job right partners will want to work with us and our base will grow."
Vapour Media was founded in 2013 by Mercer, Dominic Waterson and Jason Sharp, who each saw a big opportunity in improving the way networks and voice services are provided and delivered. Backed by private equity, Vapour Media has an experienced team with the ambition and ability to grow into a significant supplier to the channel. The company is expanding quickly and expects to reach 20 staff during the next financial year.
Having left the Forces and not afraid to take calculated risks Mercer reached a cross roads in his career and naturally sought an 'exciting' opportunity. From a financial and technology prospective telecoms fitted the bill. He joined Telewest in 1999 as a Regional Sales Executive, surviving the change to NTL Telewest and again holding his own when Virgin Media came knocking. "After four years as a sales executive I was promoted to Regional Sales Manager running the Yorkshire sales team for Virgin," stated Mercer. "I did this for over eight years selling every aspect of data connectivity to SMEs and corporates, winning lucrative accounts and driving up revenues in excess of £20 million per year."
In 2010 Mercer reached another turning point in his career and decided to change direction, partly encouraged by fellow director and best friend Dom Waterson, a serial entrepreneur who has been in telecoms since 1992 and owns another successful telecoms business. "Through my own desire to start a company and Dom's constant drive to move into the data arena we decided to write a plan," explained Mercer. "We required funding to build our own MPLS network and luckily the funders where interested from day one but said we would need an experienced Financial Director. We met with Jason Sharp who was also looking for the same type of opportunity. Jason was group FD at Daisy during its fantastic buying spree and he brings a wealth of experience that keeps our feet on the ground."
The Vapour team have a wide variety and depth of experience that ranges from starting up businesses from scratch to working in some of the largest Plcs in the UK. "This gives us a great perspective on building a new business and what it takes to run and grow a larger organisation," commented Mercer. "We know what great looks like and what poor feels like. We focus on what we are good at, ensure we support our partners and recognise each of them and their customers as individuals."
Mercer describes Vapour's company culture as a 'hologram' of what is happening in the wider business environment and in peoples' personal lives. "This outlook applies to the products we sell, our work ethics and the flexibility in how we interact with our staff and partners," he commented. "The Vapour team have sold these type of products before, delivered them and felt the ups and downs of a client's pain, hence the reason for our focus on improving the way networks and voice services are provided and delivered to customers."
Vapour Media has grown quickly over the last year having established competitive commercials with the Tier 1 suppliers for a set of robust access, data, voice and SaaS products. "Our short-term aims are to sign up a number of key partners from the channel and support them in delivering these products to their customers," added Mercer. "We are in the process of developing a portal which will allow our partners to log in and receive instant pricing, sales and marketing support and training to enable them to confidentially sell out products. Due to steady growth in our reseller base we are now able to expand our team bringing in some great assets that will help make 2014 a successful year for Vapour."
Mercer believes that the evolving comms sector will see greater adoption of cloud and hosted telephony, and there will be more partnerships with suppliers that can manage the network access to connect customer sites while also being able to manage the voice element across the network from one network operations centre. "Too many resellers still view cloud as a potential opportunity," added Mercer. "We see it as a big risk for many of them if they don't get on board and adopt what is becoming the dominant technology. They will be left behind. Their competitors are adopting cloud and their customers are being led by consumer advances in cloud products and services such as Dropbox and Skype. They expect similar technologies at work."
To capitalise on these trends Vapour Media built its own partner agnostic data network to deliver services from the four main Tier 1 carriers, interconnecting into two data centres. "This gives us resilience and flexibility as well as more choice for the reseller and customer base," said Mercer. "Our strategy to deliver next generation voice services saw us become an early adopter of Content Guru's cloud platform. Our sales focus is purely channel driven providing the reseller with the confidence to work with us to identify opportunities within their customer base. We also white label our marketing materials and support both them and the end client through every step of the process, from ordering to delivery and ongoing support." •