Just around Christmas we announced the acquisition of VCOMM, previously a subsidiary of Coms PLC. With all of the integration work that’s going on at the moment work has been pretty busy, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about what this means for my team and I – I’m sure our MD, Steve Harris would have plenty to say on the commercial side,  but I’m going to focus on the technical and service delivery aspects.

Those people who read this blog who are our customers are already familiar with the incredible quality of service that we already offer. We’ve made it a point that any new product we bring on board isn’t sold until we understand the equipment, how to design networks with it, deploy it, configure it, break it, fix it and debug it. We make a point of knowing the products well enough that most of the questions we see are answered within the team and not escalated to the vendor. As a result, we close some 75% of tickets in-house. This has resulted in some interesting feedback including one customer who’s a major UK provider of hosted telephony remarking that he would groan when we said we’d have to escalate to a vendor as he knew it wouldn’t be resolved quickly.

Of course, this kind of knowledge doesn’t happen overnight, so products in the VCOMM range that we don’t know will take a little time to get to that standard, however there’s some crossover there that we can take advantage of immediately. Our ideals and goals that our technical team applies to the work we do will apply equally to the work we do with the VCOMM customers, something I think will benefit everyone in the long run.

Although this isn’t going to have a significant impact on our operations in Siphon immediately we’re working hard to make sure that whatever changes we make are for the better for both companies – and I can tell you that the team is excited by the acquisition and the opportunities it’s going to bring us and our customers!

It’s been a fascinating day here at Connections with some interesting announcements from BroadSoft. Two in particular have caught my eye.

The first is the announcement from BroadSoft of their launch of “UC One” – a service offering bringing together a number of features from their portfolio under a single brand. I think this is a reaction from BroadSoft to the perceived Lync threat – the entire industry is talking about Lync at the moment, although from a telephony perspective, industry analyst Matt Townend recently blogged that Lync appears to be making less of an impact than it would seem.

There’s been some interesting commentary from a number of attendees covering the whole spectrum of opinions, but for me the key point from this announcement is that not all of the services that form part of the portfolio are operating in Europe. However, whether you take advantage of the cloud offerings from BroadSoft or not, there’s plenty of new features to keep people happy including some UI enhancements to the client applications.

What’s of more interest to me personally is the announcement of BroadSoft’s Xtended Connect service. Partnering with Intellipeer this is a particularly powerful service that allows BroadSoft customers to connect to each other globally over IP, allowing HD voice and video calls to be passed between networks. HD voice (using the G.722 codec) is a huge step up from the PSTN and one of those features that sets VoIP apart from traditional phone systems. Creating a single, larger network of interconnected service providers can only be a good thing in my opinion. I’ll be spending some time tomorrow looking into the service and finding out how it works, both from a commercial and technical sense.