Comms Business Magazine met up with Dave Glasgow, a founder and Director of IP Integration, Avaya’s recently crowned Enterprise Growth Partner of the Year, to find out how it has been for them during the difficulties the vendor experienced in recent times and IPI’s exciting plans for growth.
Established 18 years ago, Reading based reseller IP Integration has worked closely with Avaya since the beginning so it was an obvious question to ask how the last year or so has been whilst the vendor was in Chapter 11 (The US bankruptcy protection code).
“We never lacked confidence in a good outcome,” says Dave Glasgow. “There was opportunistic and aggressive moves by a number of competitive vendors but it was only ever a case of how long it would take for Avaya to restructure and emerge fighting fit. Yes, it would be true to say we lost one or two deals and some customers leveraged better commercials but during the whole period we continued to grow as a business.”
What does the Avaya Enterprise Growth Partner award mean?
Dave Glasgow: The award recognises the part that IP Integration has played in successfully selling and supporting Avaya solutions over the past twelve months, how IPI consistently demonstrated an ability to win major new enterprise customers and establish long term client relationships, both of which have contributed to a hugely successful Avaya number in FY17.
Today it would be very challenging for a reseller to successfully set themselves up as a supplier of Avaya Enterprise solutions. We are in a small group of around three or four Avaya Enterprise resellers in the UK and in the top ten in Europe.
Over the last year we have built on our technical competence to support existing and planned product announcements for the contact centre market from Avaya, and from new vendors whose solutions are wholly complementary. We worked closely with Avaya throughout the time the company was in Chapter 11, drawing them closer to our customers at every level. This not only helped to reinforce Avaya’s commitment to supporting them in the immediate term, but also built positive relationships for the future.
The success of this strategy coupled with Avaya’s continued plans to invest in R&D, accelerate innovation and re-engineer its core platforms, means that IP Integration is forecasting healthy revenue increases in the year ahead.
What steps and plans has IP Integration made to further grow the business?
Over the last four years we have grown from £12m to £20m turnover and now have an infrastructure to take the business much further.
We anticipate strong growth in 2018, maximising on the investment we have already made in our technical teams, application development and consulting practice, together with Avaya’s innovative approach and the integrated technology solutions we can offer our customers as a result of our vendor relationships.
IP Integration has made a number of investments including an imminent move to a new, larger headquarters – literally just across the road on the same business park.
Additionally, we have a new management team headed up by Chairman Alastair Mills, the ex CEO of Six Degrees and two further C Level executives that worked with Alastair there. Alongside this we have recruited a new Sales Director who has joined us from Avaya.
It’s a highly competitive market you are working in – how does IP Integration add vale and differentiate?
We have developed our own branded PCI-DSS solution called TrustCall On Demand. It is a cloud-based software solution that can either be embedded into existing Customer Relationship Management systems or used as a stand-alone web application.
Simply put, using a hosted or cloud-based solution to intercept card data at the network level means that no cardholder data is passed into the contact centre environment, whether infrastructure, agents or storage, thus de-scoping telephone payments from PCI DSS compliance.
Users today are buying business outcomes not technology which is great as it means we can have business conversations about making sure our customers get real value for money from their investments and not just talk about the technology.