COMMS PEOPLE Abbey’s family link Balancing the books: Grady joins son at Abbey Also on the move... Marcus Campbell
MARCUS Campbell has been appointed National Sales Manager at Tollring to drive business development across the iC suite hosted business analytics and icall suite call management portfolios. Campbell boasts
20 years industry experience in fixed and mobile telephony, call management and voice recording. He said: “This opportunity not only provides me with an exciting portfolio of solutions but also removes the restrictions commonly faced with out-of-the-box offerings. I am looking forward to contributing to Tollring’s next phase of growth.”
DAMOVO Global Services has swooped on Paul Brewer who has been appointed as Sales Director. With almost 20 years in the IT and telecoms sector Brewer’s experience includes senior sales management roles and global managed ICT services working with multi-national organisations across Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific. Mary Bradshaw, Managing Director, said: “Paul’s ability to develop strong
Paul Brewer
propositions, motivate teams and deliver consistent revenue growth will play a significant role in helping us to achieve our business objectives.”
ABBEY Telecom has proved just the job for father and son team Anthony Grady, 51, and 25-year-old Dominic. Grady senior landed the job of balancing the books at Abbey Telecom, joining his son who sits just a few desks away. “As any proud father would, I have followed Dominic’s career with great interest,” said Grady senior. “As a result, I’ve got to know many of the Abbey Telecom staff in recent years. When he came home from work one day and mentioned that there was an accounting position available, we thought why not see if we can work together. So I jumped at the opportunity and a couple of interviews later I landed a job.” Commenting on working alongside his Dad, Dominic said: “He always keeps an eye on me and I’m sure it will be more than the company books that he keeps in good order.”
Folkerd takes high tech role
MANCHESTER- based cloud hosting firm UKFast has
appointed Chris Folkerd as Director of Enterprise Technology. He takes on the newly created role after two years with UKFast working as a Technical Manager. Before joining UKFast he was a researcher at Brunel University working with the National Police Improvement Agency, studying the development of complex IT solutions while completing a PhD in computer science. He is an integral part of the infrastructure R&D team, responsible for the firm’s key product launches including eCloud, the elastic cloud product launched last month. Folkerd said: “Concentrating solely on our enterprise client base allows me to work on some of the world’s busiest websites and most complex hosting solutions. Developing new technologies and products is hugely exciting and a responsibility which I’m honoured to take on.” UKFast CEO, Lawrence Jones, added: “With Chris at the helm of our enterprise technologies I’m 100 per cent certain we will stay ahead of the curve.”
Chris Folkerd BARNARD
MARGIN, WHEREFORE ART THOU? According to delegates and sponsors at Comms Dealer’s recent Margin in Voice & Data event it’s all very clear, or, all very confusing depending on whether you’re smart; whether you’re customers are smart, or whether you’re not in either of the above.
Case in point, the redoubtable Oak CEO James Emm sold more CPE than ever last quarter – best ever quarter no less – and is only now offering cloud/hosted versions in his portfolio. The interesting thing about margin is that it’s there, the client spend is available. We all know rentals have differing margins from services, that call minutes and other items like storage or hardware are declining rapidly at the unit cost level. What’s the point of fixating on gross margin if your revenue is down 25 per cent year-on-year because of price erosion? There are bigger matters like sales to focus on.
So to make a business stronger and more profitable I believe one should look at wallet share first, in other words, the addressable spend. How much are we doing for these customers? How much are others doing? When we see the totality of the ICT budget the key drivers change and the answers are clear. Now, some of us won’t like the answer. If we want to continue ploughing a single furrow so be it, but there is, to my mind, a direct correlation between providing mutli-products, multi-service solutions and increasing wallet share and margin.
When Modern had maybe four key revenue lines we struggled to get over 30 per cent. Granted we had a larger base of lower margin mobile at the time. But since 2008, by offering more services and directly supporting ICT ‘support’ contracts we’re not >45%. Payroll mix has changed and I will say that running a bias towards techie support has different challenges, but actually the truth is that we create more, real bottom line value like this.
Funnily enough the converged clients feel more valued too, and our account management tools and reporting are improved, better than ever.
What a virtuous and generative place to be dear hearts!
And finally, well done to Nigel and the team for their excellent hospitality and speakers at MiVaD. Next up is Gleneagles – c’est dur la vie.
Barnard
Champagne? A bottle awaits so do mail gossip, the best story or comment to
andfinally@modcomms.com
Adrian Barnard is Managing Director of London based Modern Communications, a provider of converged business communications services.
60 COMMS DEALER JULY 2013
www.comms-dealer.com
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