BUSINESS PROFILE Red Box set for growth
Red Box Recorders is confronting industry norms and pushing traditional boundaries in the digital recording sector, according to Lee Jones, COO, who predicts sales growth in excess of 25 per cent over the next 12 months.
Lee Jones R
ed Box Recorders has big ambitions and a solid
expansion strategy
both in the UK and globally. It’s roadmap is already paying off with a significant number of recent business wins in mainland Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. “Our plan is to continue to move from direct to reseller model with on-premise solutions while moving towards offering everything currently available as a truly viable hosted solution,” said Jones. “We are looking to increase our resellers across all major markets and also have more focus on resellers for hosted solutions. Market trends lend themselves to our strengths of open architecture and our continued development of in cloud and hosted solutions.”
The market trends and emerging markets that are influencing Red Box Recorders’ go-to-market strategy include hosted solutions, in cloud and virtualisation. “These are the main trends to consider along
with the new FSA regulations regarding mobile recording and other compliance issues,” said Jones. “We will continue to grow our portfolio to address these areas. We also plan to extend our reseller reach globally and continue to develop relationships with existing technology partners such as Mitel, Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft and BT.”
Fifty per cent of the company’s human resource is deployed in research and development and their latest triumph is a just launched embedded mobile phone recording solution. “We developed our own technology to cover this vital area,” noted Jones. “It follows a decision to offer customers a solution that does not discriminate between mobile and fixed line recording through price or functionality.”
Designed to meet the stringent FSA requirements, this fully compliant mobile recording solution treats mobile recording as any other end point and does
not charge the customer a premium. As it does not need additional software licenses, expensive upgrades or complex integration software the Red Box mobile phone recording solution is cost- effective and competitive. “It works seamlessly with the existing Red Box fixed line recording solutions and is available as a on-premise or hosted recording system with the option for subscription based pricing,” said Jones. “It can also be covered by customers’ existing maintenance agreements.”
Stand out factor
What marks this solution out is that it does not rely entirely upon multiple third party products to handle mobile recording. “We decided to use our specialist skills and resources to develop our own product which continues the Red Box ethos of providing solutions that are simple, easy to use and cost-effective,” added Jones. “A major challenge for us is embedded voice recording solutions from telcos and other hosted providers. We will continue to develop our market specific applications to work on top of telco offerings and to develop our product portfolio including support for hosted environments. Our open architecture, strong development strategy
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and approach to new technologies enables Red Box to be able to adapt quickly and easily to these new and exciting challenges.”
It is the company’s belief that within the digital recording marketplace too many solutions are too complex and costly for most businesses. Red Box follows a policy of being clear, down-to-earth and practical which translates directly into the technology solutions that it offers, according to Jones. “The company has developed a simple, smart approach to delivering realistically priced solutions to meet the precise needs of customers,” he added.
The firm’s approach to product development and delivery is rooted in a pedigree of innovation and opportunism that can be traced back to the company’s beginnings. When Red Box Recorders was established it was less of an idea and more the seizing of an opportunity, recalls CEO Iain Worthington. “I was working in a small team of software and hardware developers on a project to create a document processing system in the days when nothing of its kind existed,” he said. “It all happened very quickly around Christmas 1988 when myself
and two colleagues offered to develop the system for the current backers, bypassing the incumbent management team. To our surprise they said yes, and two days later on Christmas Eve we had a company registered and had our first office.”
Developing hardware, and software during the early days of the industry was exciting, if not a little frightening, says Worthington. “Our biggest piece of luck, something every business needs, was meeting Racal Recorders, a leader in reel-to-reel voice recorders,” he stated. “Today, Red Box has launched many voice and call recording products. By running on a single server these systems keep operating costs to a minimum, and because it is completely converged – not a diverse set of components – it is easy to integrate to telephony platforms and totally scalable.”
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VITAL STATS Headcount: 70 employees Turnover: £10m Sales Growth: 2009 up 47%, 2010 32%, Forecast 2011 25% Contract wins: Red Box has secured a significant number of contracts among blue-chip customers and provides solutions for over a third of all police authorities in England and Wales.
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