Technology Reseller - v31

01732 759725 Q&A 46 ...continued Because we built Vapour Cloud as a cloud business – a software business for voice – we can flex up and down to meet customers’ voice needs very, very quickly. We also had to make sure businesses’ networks would support people working from home and that we could support them. That was more of a challenge. We had a week and a half when our engineers were working through the night to make sure people at home were set up properly because, as you can imagine, everyone wanted it today. We must have had 50 calls like that a day. It was ridiculous. What you often find is that management say everyone’s going to work from home, but forget all about where their servers are based and whether they have enough bandwidth to support more people working from home, logging in and trying to get access to systems and services. Do you need to upgrade it? Those are the challenges we have had to overcome. TR : You talk about being a specialist but at the same time a lot of businesses like to go to one supplier for convenience. Does that supplier then need to build relationships with the specialists so that they can offer a good service? TM: Generally, businesses, especially smaller firms, will want an IT support company to look after them across all IT platforms and services. The IT support company might also supply them with hardware and Microsoft services, but they probably won’t know how to build a network and they won’t know how to build a voice platform. So, in general, they look course, but that’s predominantly how the channel has been for the last 20 to 30 years. The network is the foundation of our business. For us, voice is just an application that sits on the network. As long as you have built the network correctly and understand the customer’s needs, the application should work fine. A lot of people, when they are building secure voice platforms and services don’t understand – or underestimate – the complexities of building networks and services that have to integrate into a LAN environment, into a security infrastructure. We are very good at that. That capability is becoming more and more important, especially in this world where you have people working from home – how do we get data to them? how do we extend that voice platform to them? how do we support them? We have Betfred’s contact centre working from home on iPads – the whole voice platform for 2,500 users is on our network and, because of Covid-19, its people are now at home. TR : You must have had lots of customers asking you to set up home working packages since March. TM: Yes, we have. Most people would have had some homeworking capability from the start, primarily for the management team. If you were building a network and voice platform for 100 users, you would typically have 20 home workers. What happened with Covid was that very quickly all 100 of those people needed to work from home. for a partner to do that. That’s where we come in. The customer will say ‘I am moving office; I am upgrading my phone system’ and the support company will say ‘Vapour Cloud can come in and do that for you; we trust them; we know we can work with them. We will do your IT support and your hardware, Tim will do the network and the voice platform, and together we will support you 24/7. If there is a problem we will talk to Tim’s guys and together we will sort it out’. The customer really likes that level of trust. They feel much more comfortable using a business recommended by their IT support company than an outside company they have never heard of. TR : Do you provide that sort of support on a white label basis or is it always clear that the network and voice platform are being provided by Vapour Cloud? TM: We have always been really upfront that the end user has to know we are involved in the chain. Even if we white label the documentation for the client, it is important that the client speaks to us. Instead of us asking the partner a lot of technical questions about the network and the partner then asking the customer, we insist that we speak to the customer. ‘It’s a 24/7 support contract and when there is a fault, they are going to be ringing us and we are not answering the phone as you, we are answering the phone as Vapour’. We are very, very transparent with the end user. It’s important for credibility and for support. What we don’t want to see is a partner buying a service from us and pretending it is theirs: a) you always get found out; and b) you will cause us problems because you will be talking to the customer about SLAs, platforms and technical services that you know nothing about. You will probably be making judgments and decisions that you shouldn’t, to the detriment of everybody’s business. It’s important we speak to end users and that end users understand where we fit in. TR : What are your priorities for 2020? TM: We had a fairly robust plan of what we were going to do and how we were going to achieve it, which included a management buy-out. We broke even at the beginning of this year and the plan was to grow our revenue and make sure we put good enough numbers on the table so that the private equity guys got a return on their money and I could take back some control. We gave a lot of control