When we caught up with Barry Kaye, chief operating officer at TelcoSwitch, it was clear that technology excellence is at the heart of the company’s ambitions. Kaye started his career working as a software developer within the financial sector, rising into senior technology roles including a stint as head of IT at Close Brothers Asset Management.
Kaye said of his decision to move into operations that this is a choice many developers face. He said, “There’s a point where you can’t quite stare at the coalface anymore, and you need to advance your career.”
After leaving the city, Kaye worked at a reseller where he met Russell Lux, who is now CEO of TelcoSwitch. Lux left that company to found Telcoswitch, and the two reconnected a few years later. Kaye explained, “I bumped into Russell at a show. We got chatting, we hadn’t spoken for a little while, and it’s just one of those conversations that was very fortuitous. The next day, we shook hands and I joined the business.”
TelcoSwitch has had to adapt to the ongoing pandemic. Kaye said, “We faced many new challenges. The most obvious one, like every other business, was the migration to working from home for our staff, as well as all of our customers down the chain.
“We understood very quickly that the business could potentially thrive in these times. [we could] prove our platform and… thrive and grow over the course of last year.”
Funding boost
In January, TelcoSwitch announced it had secured £4m in growth capital funding. This was the company’s first external funding round, with £2.5m raised through BOOST&Co and the remaining £1.5m coming from existing investors.
Kaye discussed the company’s plans. He said, “We want to grow the business significantly. We turned over £5 million in revenue at the end of 2019. We turned over just over £7 million last year. It’s our target to double that this year. The funding will help to escalate our growth plans, firstly [with] recruitment. [So we can make sure that] operationally, we’ve got the right people in the right places, ready to support our growth.”
Kaye added that the company would also use the funding to further its acquisition strategy, and pointed to TelcoSwitch’s recent acquisition of the OneVoice cloud-based hosted telephony platform from Qunifi. As part of the acquisition the OneVoice base of resellers will migrate to become TelcoSwitch channel partners.
He explained, “Principally we made the acquisition to bring in a customer base, [which] brings in revenue on a monthly basis. But it also gave us exposure and technology to integrate into the hospitality sector.”
The future
Kaye said the company will look to make future acquisitions to access new customer bases and technology expertise. In addition, the company is looking to significantly grow its number of channel partners. The recruitment mentioned earlier will support this, as well as plans to double the company’s office space to facilitate up to 100 employees across sales, account management, and support.
TelcoSwitch has also seen significant organic growth, which Kaye explained will strengthen the company’s ambitions and help it unlock new growth opportunities. He said that in April the company surpassed 100,000 users on its platform. “That opens new opportunities and new doors for us.”
Kaye is optimistic about the future of TelcoSwitch and explained that the company’s technology will support its ambitions. He said the company can follow its own path due to its autonomy. “We own our technology. If we want to create a feature, whatever that might be within the platform, we can do that internally. We have control of our own source code, we have control of our technology. We are proprietary owners of our own technology, and we can move fast.”