Technology Reseller - v31

technologyreseller.co.uk Q&A 47 be run as a private voice platform. It sits in our datacentre, in our network and we can deliver it privately across our core and support it properly. We have won plenty of business off the back of that, including JCT600, a big car dealership in the North with 48 garages and over £1 billion in turnover. We took around 50 separate Avaya phone systems and turned them into one big cloud platform for them. I spoke to them the other day and they said it was a good job they had done that because they wouldn’t be able to furlough staff and operate as a business today if they had had 50 separate phone systems. We became one of Avaya’s fastest growing mid-market voice partners in the UK last year. All we do is cloud – we don’t away at the beginning because we were a seed fund business. People took a punt on us and it’s time they got some money back, and it’s time I got some control back. That plan is up in the air now, as you can imagine. If we can get through this year on a sound footing with most of our customers intact, we should have a good 2021 because I think people will be looking for businesses that were sustainable in 2020 – it shows they have a good business plan. We’ve got enough cash in the bank for the whole of the year and we don’t need to furlough anyone. That should give our customers and our partners a solid base to work on in 2020 and on into 2021. TR : We haven’t mentioned Avaya yet. They are obviously a very important partner of yours (see box) . TM: We run two voice platforms. Originally, we were a Storm cloud contact centre platform partner. We chose Storm because we wanted to be different and we wanted higher end customers – we didn’t want to be competing in the 15 to 20 user market. That market is incredibly cut-throat; there’s not a lot of profit, there’s a high customer churn rate and there’s a lot of bad debt. So, we built the Storm platform into our business. We are a big BT player as well. And BT became a wholesale provider for Avaya. We sometimes missed work because we were too expensive with Storm and too complicated, so we were looking for an alternative provider and the Avaya platform met our needs. We were already integrated into the BT network and the platform could In the news Avaya partner Vapour Cloud has launched a new, cloud- based communications offering based on the technologies of global communications leader Avaya. The new offering will provide partners and customers with all their enterprise-ready software, support and updates under a single, simple and flexible contract. Vapour Cloud, with its own private network infrastructure, ensures secure, robust delivery for contact centre operations and larger SMEs. Under the agreement, Vapour Cloud can empower existing Avaya partners with the ‘engine’ to deliver cloud-based communications to their own customer base. Vapour has invested more than £2 million in building two private MPLS networks spanning five UK data centres and can also provide an end-to-end service wrap complete with SIP, if required. est4 Vapour Cheshire-headquartered Unified Communications specialist Zest4, the preferred wholesale provider of 8x8 cloud voice, has migrated its on-prem estate to a co-location facility in Manchester in a new collaboration with Vapour Cloud. The company’s four servers will be co-located in one of Vapour’s five secure, private ISO27001-accredited data centres, with two managed circuits providing high bandwidth connectivity to the internet and back to the core, plus private access into Vapour’s Veeam backup. The set-up gives Zest4 a robust disaster recovery strategy, coupled with 99.99% uptime, that will future-proof the business as it expands its customer base and adds extra functionality. Multi-site telephony Leicester-headquartered insurance brokers Erskine Murray has invested in a multi-site cloud telephony system powered by Vapour Cloud. It is replacing on-prem systems at each of its four UK offices with an Avaya cloud voice infrastructure better suited to the needs of its 100 workers, half of whom are field-based. The £7m turnover business has invested in Avaya licences with real time reporting, unified communications functionality to support remote working, phone hardware and connectivity through Vapour’s private MPLS network. Erskine Murray Finance Director John Adey says the investment was well timed. “When we first began the transition to Vapour’s cloud voice solution, nobody could have anticipated that COVID-19 was on the horizon. But this is a perfect example of the need to prepare for the unexpected. Our business continuity planning meant we could adapt to lockdown constraints with relative ease, which has protected the productivity and morale of staff, as well as the level of service we provide to customers.” do any tin, everything is licences. That is obviously the model Avaya wants to move to and we’ve got a good relationship with them, so much so that we have just built our own Avaya platform in our datacentre, so we don’t have to use BT any more. We buy directly from distribution and have a really good relationship with Westcon. Where a partner is looking for network support and a cloud platform, Westcon will work with us on speaking to resellers/partners. That has allowed us to deal not just with IT partners and support companies, but with Avaya partners too. Partners that were once predominantly selling IP Office systems to end users are now coming to us to buy the network from us and the voice platform. That is a cultural change.