One Year On. Voicenet Solutions CEO gives First Year Analysis

Kevin Scott-Cowell looks back at his first year as CEO of Voicenet Solutions and predicts a strong and exciting future for the business....

What attracted you to Voicenet Solutions in the first place?

I’ve been working in telecommunications for the vast majority of my career, initially with a number of  the big players (GPT, BT, Ericsson, Nortel, etc) but over the last 15 years or so leading smaller businesses to maximise their potential, a much more enjoyable and exciting prospect! It was clear to me at first glance that Voicenet Solutions had a great pedigree and was going places; an established and well known brand, a great service, a reputation for delivery, and a large and growing customer base backed by one of the most experienced and enthusiastic teams in the sector. Joining Voicenet Solutions was one of the easiest decisions I have had to make in a long time!

What were your priorities?

Since Voicenet Solutions was founded in 2004, we’ve grown year on year and built one of the biggest customer bases in the market through a well developed channel model and probably the best fully featured business products available. Continuing our sales growth was obviously a given, but it was clear that we needed to pay more attention to our established customer base and move our customer service up a few notches to “best in class” levels. We surveyed our customer base and got some great feedback (both good and not so good) and used that to change some of the things we do – for example we’ve invested in account management, a new CRM system, and redefined our internal SLAs, and we will continue to drive forward on this journey in to 2011.

An equally important priority was the delivery of additional value to our customers through the availability of applications, which working with the core communications system enhance performance, productivity and provide business specific solutions. One example of this is the real time MIS 1000 and 2000 real time management information applications, and we have others in the pipeline for the coming year.

How’s the Telecoms Market?

We've grown a third in the last 12 months and the market for hosted services continues to gain momentum; post the worst part of the recession we’ve seen more new players enter the market, some of the big old guns start making noises, and we think there has been another significant step towards favouring hosted over on premise solutions (especially if the vote for Voicenet at Convergence North’s Hosted Vs. IPBX face off was anything to go by). I think we are all to some extent still being held back by a cautious sentiment in the economy, but I don’t see any reason why we can't show similar growth if not greater, over the next year.

What are your plans for the channel?

We have a great set of channel partners, many of whom have been with us for most of our journey.

We’ve just released the latest version of our dealer portal and support tools and had a great response. But we’re also looking for new channel partners who want to lead with a hosted product and who have the necessary sales and technical strength to make good progress. We’ve strengthened our channel development team to do just that, and by the end of the year we expect to have some new and very productive new partners selling the Voicenet Solutions product.

So, What about the future?

The future looks good to us. There will be plenty of challenges to deal with along the way, but the hosted services arena is a vibrant one which will continue to provide opportunities for some time to come.

I look forward to my next year at Voicenet Solutions with relish!

CEO Voicenet Solutions