500

28th – 29th June 2011 – IT Decisions Conference

Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster

500 Limited, a specialist communications provider are exhibiting at the IT Decision Conference which is focusing on ‘cloud-based’ IT services.  500 Limited are offering visitors a 20 minute health check on their current communication systems — to see if they are ready to use ‘cloud-based‘ telephony services for their business.

Bleeding-edge businesses have already proved the concept; its use is growing exponentially and now is the opportunity for businesses to see if the time is right to adopt these now proven ‘cloud-based’ services.

Health Check

‘Cloud-based’ is not right for everyone — it depends on multiple factors, for example: the split of office, home, and mobile workers, across multiple or single sites. It depends how new prospects get in touch with you and it depends if you sell services or products or you are a not for profit organisation. It depends on risk and budgets and quality of service. Every business’ solution will be unique.

500 Limited consider are known experts in ‘cloud-based’ telephony and would welcome the opportunity to share their knowledge with visitors. 500 Limited will provide visitors with simple advice on their unique requirements.

What is ‘cloud-based’ telephony?

The telecoms sector is full of jargon and acronyms and of course so is ‘cloud-based’ telephony. So you will hear terms like: hosted, virtual, unified communications, computer telephony integration, SIP trunks and much more. 500 Limited’s preferred explanation is: “business grade telephony services provided remotely across the Internet”. However every business is unique so do call on them at the show for a chat.

Contact 500 Limited

500 Limited have offices in the City and in St Albans and would be delighted if visitors want to pre-book an appointment. Simply contact 500 Limited on 0845 0000 500 and talk to one of their experts. Or visit their web site and contact them that way: www.500.uk.com

Last week saw the launch of 500 Limited’s Business Networking Forum.  The meeting was held at the Blue Anchor in St Albans, with 12 members attending.  The group was extremely fortunate to have Anthony McKay as its guest speaker and Anthony’s chosen subject was: “Achieving Business Growth – the barriers and how to jump them.”

Anthony modestly introduced himself by outlining how he had taken his company, Telephonetics plc, from a small private company in the early 1990s, through flotation on AIM in July 2005 through to its sale to Netcall plc in 2010.  Anthony’s presentation provided many tips and techniques on how to grow a business both organically and via acquisition.  The key tips are reported below:

Cash flow. Anthony’s simple clear message was to spend money on productivity; buying the right tools for the job prudently.  Telephonetics were very disciplined about managing their finances, using spreadsheets and simple cash forecasting during their early years.  Key to managing cash flow was the management of payment terms, not accepting anything other than 30 days and chasing down all late payments.  Delightfully, Anthony gave an interesting example of invoking late payment penalty terms on a large company – which in the end they honoured, always sticking to agreed schedules thereafter.  Not for the faint hearted for sure – but demonstrated a determination to manage cash flow.

Cost control. Again during the early years, before employing a financial controller, Telephonetics’ directors used to carefully control expenditure; continuously reviewing costs and suppliers; signing every cheque themselves.  They also created formal audited accounts before the law required them to and these were very useful when valuing the business at a later date and when demonstrating financial stability.

Recruitment. Only recruit high quality people based on rigorous assessment of capabilities and if the quality isn’t there don’t compromise.  When in the situation of – considering a candidate who has all of the right qualifications but your gut instinct feels something is wrong – trust your gut!

Productivity. Anthony felt strongly that it was important for the business to provide the motivators, which don’t have to be money / salary / bonuses.  Instead they could be as simple as free tea and coffee or as complicated as share options (really good to give people even a small stake) or perhaps group team building activities.  The key elements are communications, involvement and creating an ethos.

Retention. Everyone should have performance reviews rather than pay reviews and under-performance shouldn’t get rewarded.  The key element to retention is to facilitate everyone in the team to be productive. Removal of frustrating barriers to productivity is crucial. If you help make them productive you will reward their performance which will mean the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence. Have an open door policy, listen to your people and help solve their problems.

Size. Anthony answered the question about does size matter(!) when selling to the big players in the market place.  Size doesn’t matter if you have a ‘must have’ product or service the prospect wants; size does matter if the customer gets nervous of your ability to look after them.  The key therefore is to avoid that question in the first place by giving the perception of size and ability from the outset.  For example have a phone system that channels callers to the relevant department; even if the call is eventually answered by one person! or, have lots of case studies of happy customers; perception is everything!

Marketing. Anthony identified that in line with traditional marketing strategies Telephonetics simply adopted the tactics: understand who you want to sell to, identify what their problems are, and then tell them how you can solve them. They targeted specific markets, with specific solutions, focusing on valuable USPs. Anthony’s advice was: think solutions not products, benefits not features, add extra services to differentiate and aim to provide the whole solution – be the One Stop Shop! It was essential to provide a ‘really good service’ – organise and train for it.

Growth. Anthony spoke on how they tried to grow both organically and by acquisition.  The key element of organic growth was to align all the stakeholders’ objectives and have an exit strategy for the business with milestones / targets along the route.  With these in place it was then easier to understand the barriers to organic growth – cash, expertise, fear, market conditions and so forth, these could then be tackled systematically.

Acquisition. Anthony spoke with real experience, obviously hard won, when discussing acquisitions.  The fundamental starting position is to ensure that the home team have common objectives and agreement on the roles of everyone in the new organisation.  Due diligence was essential and mergers don’t work, inevitably one party will be stronger.  Anthony emphasized it was “always a take over, never a merger”. In addition you will need to determine which culture you will adopt, if necessary department by department.  Anthony also said to be wary of the ‘skirt lifters’, companies making compelling offers to buy, who turn out to be time wasters just trying to look at your private parts to gain a competitive edge! If you are considering selling your business Anthony recommended a staged information exchange to avoid these time wasters.

Earn outs. Anthony recommended against earn outs if possible – sadly personal interests to earn more would undoubtedly conflict with the new managements team’s aims and objectives and therefore end up being counter-productive.  After a short handover, gardening leave and structured payments are preferable.

Advisors. Whilst a necessity to employ an expert, it is sensible to cap the fees if at all possible.  Certainly an experienced advisor should be able to provide a fee ceiling and a structured spend model.

Benefits of flotation. In 2005 Anthony successfully floated Telephonetics on AIM, cleverly retaining control (51% shareholding) of the company.  He described the key benefits as: it gave a source of money to spread their wings and it gave paper (share certificates) to fund acquisitions.  It also increased the motivation of the staff as their share options were now real!  However it was expensive; they then had to report to the shareholders, particularly on the profitability of the company,.

Sale. The three key elements of selling the business, which was successfully achieved in 2010, were: a) know why you are selling – get shareholder agreement aligned and signed off, avoiding u-turns; b) become valuable to a buyer, possibly by being a competitive nuisance and c) be capable of demonstrating value to the buyer (back to those accounts – to value the company they had to accurately predict profits – not always an easy thing to do!).

Anthony concluded with the thought of how he had avoided the earn-out(!); giving him time to enter local politics by being successfully elected as a Councillor for Hemel Hempstead – for which we congratulate him.

Following Anthony’s excellent talk the debate opened up to the floor and this led nicely into a networking session over a light gastro-pub lunch.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday 12^th July – details to follow – please enter this in your diary!

This article was written by Paula Bernier and reposted from April 2011 issue of Unified Communications magazine.

Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and ShoreTel are the companies that typically come to mind when you’re talking about unified communications. But if you want a true A to Z picture of UC today, another company you might want to consider is Zultys.

Zultys is staging a comeback under relatively new ownership amanagement, which reports that between 2009 and 2010 it was able to double sales and establish more than 100 channel partnerships in North America alone.

“So we’ve been having great success,” says Chairman and CEO Neil Lichtman.

Lichtman, a 27-year veteran of the phone system and UC business, joined Zultys in November of 2009. Then, last year, Lichtman brought his long-time co-worker Steven Francis, who now serves as chief sales and marketing officer at Zultys, aboard.

The two men are now working to bring Zultys – which the company’s spokeswoman says has for years been “fairly stealth” – out of the shadows and on to center stage in the UC arena.

While Zultys is relatively well known in the industry by its competitors and the channel partner community, Francis says, it may not be as well known with those that influence the telecom buying decisions at potential customers.

“So we’re evangelizing the company at this point,” he says.

Zultys is a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that sells an appliance delivering IP PBX, UC and call center functionality. The company has offices in Australia, Brazil, China and Russia. A privately-held firm, it won’t disclose financial details, but Lichtman says Zultys probably has one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry and has an eight-digit credit line available if needed. Currently, the company is reinvesting all of its cash into new development efforts.

The company started life in 2001. Its original owners spent close to $100 million in research and development to build the company’s solution, according to Lichtman, but they then ran out of money. In 2006, new ownership acquired the Zultys assets and brought in new management.

Today, Lichtman is at the helm of Zultys, which prides itself on delivering what management says is a feature-rich, highly scalable and integrated solution.

Because the company’s solutions rely on “pure standards-based native SIP,” they are highly efficient and offer a wide range of tightly integrated features and applications within a single appliance, according to the company. The Zultys solution does not require third-party servers or other appliances. This makes the Zultys system simple to install, maintain, upgrade and scale while reducing overall system resource and power requirements. And that provides an immediate return on investment to most companies deploying Zultys.

A single Zultys appliance can support up to 60 trunks and requires just 54 Watts of power. It is highly redundant; can be used in single or multi-site deployments; supports PSTN connectivity; and includes on-board SIP trunk resources, so businesses don’t have to use a separate gateway if they want to employ SIP trunking.

“It’s a great product, and when you show it to a channel partner, or a prospective channel partner, they just love it,” says Lichtman, noting that the channel is central to the Zultys go-to-market strategy.

The product is called the MX Unified Communications Solution. It’s a Linux-based 19-inch rack-mountable 2RU IP PBX that supports a wide array of unified communications features. That includes e-mail, fax, instant messaging, presence, SMS, voicemail and – with the new 6.0 version that was recently released – video.

“We believe we are the only company that offers an all-in-one-box phone system,” says Lichtman. Not every customer will need all of the capabilities that the MX can deliver, adds Francis, but this large applications toolbox gives Zultys partners a broad palette from which to work.

The new MX 6.0 supports integrated point-to-point HD video. With one click users can move between IM, voice and video communications. The new release also delivers video to the desktop. It includes a Salesforce.com Integration Module as well as a higher level of integration with Microsoft Outlook, which now moves call control into the Outlook screen. And it is integrated with both BlackBerry and the iPhone, requiring only the download of an application.

Enhanced contact center support is also evident in the MX 6.0. Zultys came out with MX Report toward the middle of last year. That allows the end user to customize call detail record information. Now, with MX 6.0, call center managers can create statistical reports via a simple drag and drop effort.

“That’s one of the big pushes this year” to differentiate the Zultys product, says Lichtman. While it’s businesses that ultimately use the Zultys product, Lichtman says the company considers channel partners to be its customers. Businesses then end up buying the product from those channel partners.

Zultys relies on distributors, including CTD, Target Distributing and various other general distributors (in Australia, New Zealand, South America and the U.K.), to bring its wares to the channel.

About two thirds of Zultys business comes out of North America, and the company is now in the process of expanding its sales and distribution efforts in Europe. The company’s plan for North America is to add at least 100 new channel partners this year and next. It’s also working to grow the channel in Europe, with the expectation that the European effort will contribute to the company’s growth starting next year.

To date, Zultys has deployments at about 10,000 end user business locations worldwide. With a focus on deployments involving 10 to 1,000 users, small and medium businesses make up the bulk of the company’s existing installations. But the Zultys system can scale to support up to 10,000 users and 128 locations, and the company does have some very large customers – and it expects to have more in the future.

That includes Allstate, which has regional franchises in the Midwest and Southeast. Other Zultys customers are Crossroads Foundation, which has a 23-building headquarters campus in Hong Kong, plus multiple overseas locations; Provident Funding, with 49 sites across the U.S., including its corporate headquarters and call center; Sonicwall, which has multiple sites in the U.S. and Taiwan; and Timex, which has multiple sites in the U.S. and India.

To attract more enterprise-level buyers, Zultys this year kicked off a national accounts program. Through this effort, Zultys at the top level plans to use direct sales to recruit Fortune 1,000-type buyers. But once corporate approves the product, channel partners will approach and support those large users at the local level.