UC EXPO 2017 is a celebration of unified communication, and the next steps in the communication industry. During my time at the conference, I had the opportunity to check out a lot of different and exciting things, as well as chatting with some of the biggest names in the UC sector. The head of marketing for Gamma, Justin Coombes, agreed to have a quick conversation with me about the development of the growing business, and where they might be heading in the next three to five years.
What’s Happening in Gamma Right Now
The first thing I wanted to know, was what was going on for Gamma right now. After all, this is a business that’s seen a significant amount of growth over the recent years. Coombes outlined that Gamma are now fully in the voice and cloud space, with various aspects of the business continuing to perform well. Gamma’s partners are seeing the benefit from the SIP trunking swap-out, as movements have begun to accelerate at a rapid pace.
“Gamma Horizon is building momentum very quickly too. I think the growth of both areas goes to show that the market is maturing in its understanding of these IP-based services, particularly against ISDN, and the swap-out is really gaining momentum. We’ve passed the tipping point, as far as I can see.”
It seems that the world of SIP trunking is finally evolving, and Gamma can see that they’ve hit a crucial point in their development. For them, the present is all about helping their partners to differentiate their services, and add something else to the mix besides “just” SIP trunking – which is quickly becoming a commoditised market.
“One thing we’ve introduced to SIP trunking in particular is a call manager application that sits on the top and simplifies things for the user.”
Developing Gamma Horizon
Since he’d already mentioned Gamma Horizon, I asked Justin to explain the product to me a little more.
“Horizon is a hosted PBX, but we’re taking it beyond that.” Coombes noted that Gamma have recently purchased their own mobile network, in the last eighteen months or so, and since then, they’ve been working on that network, developing it for use in their current marketplace.
“What I mean by mobile network is – If you look at mobile operators, they have two components, the core network, which drives the service and functionality, and the masts. We don’t have the masts – we have a partnership with 3 for that, but we do have our own network that we’ve bought and developed.”
The purchase of that network means that Horizon can really begin to evolve. Though there’s a lot of different products out there in the communication space that claim to be converged, the truth is that there are only a few players out there capable of integrating a mobile voice and data network and the capabilities that come with each. There’s BT, who recently acquired EE for example, Vodafone who acquired Cable and Wireless in the UK, and Gamma, who have been developing for a while now.
“Having acquired this mobile network, we’re now looking into what we can do to bring things together – particularly the fixed voice and mobile network for Horizon.”
“This year, we’ll see some new features emerge for Gamma which should start to address convergence properly, and allow mobile to become the end-client for the horizon system.”
In other words, rather than having an app-based client from Gamma, your mobile phone will have number presentation from your main phone system, it will be a client for your horizon handset, so that if you’re on the road, you can make calls that look like they’re coming from your office landline. –
Though mobile has long been a device for UC – that’s all it’s been. It’s never been a true part of UC, because the technology hasn’t been there. Now, the mobile acquisition is allowing Gamma to change that, and they’ll be building mobile capabilities into SIP trunking too.
The Strength of the Gamma Portal
Gamma is an indirect business, fundamentally. The company has a lot of resellers that they work with, and many of them are traditional fixed-voice providers, though they’re starting to work with more IT resellers too. This is particularly true as Horizon becomes an easier solution for IT resellers.
The other space that Gamma has moved into this year is the cloud. Coombes said: “We’ve been working closely with Amazon Web Services, to deliver Cloud compute and back up services to the SME space. In that space, it’s difficult to find the skills required to transfer a server into the cloud, so we’re helping our voice reseller partners understand that technology and then take that as an additional service offering to their customers.”
One of the biggest strengths that Gamma has, when it comes to its partners, in the Gamma Portal. With the portal, whatever the service offered by Gamma, from Horizon, to hosted, to SIP trunking, and cloud, they all go through the same system, making it easier to understand and provision. Gamma’s vision is to have everything in the same place, and they also have specialists in Gamma to assist their partners.
“If you look at typical businesses, less than 20% of the IT budget is spent on Comms, and the rest is spent on traditional IT. We want to get our resellers ready to take a bigger piece of that pie.”
Looking into the Future
I was keen to talk about where Gamma might be heading in the next three to five years. Coombes told me that the company never plans on standing still.
“If you look at where we came from – essentially twelve years ago, we introduced SIP trunks to the UK market. If you look at where we are now, that’s becoming a commoditised market, which means we need to look at something else, and develop. We’ll need to explore, and that’s what we’re doing in the cloud. But, it’s in the network that we see the biggest opportunities, bringing fixed voice, and mobile together.”
