Historically, the business communications market has been consistently dynamic, innovative and highly competitive. How does an independent communications developer survive and prosper for nearly two decades, delivering uninterrupted organic growth year on year and relentlessly pushing the capabilities of phone and contact centre technology?
Rafael Cortes, Foehn’s Head of Marketing, provides the answers, throwing light on the key market drivers today.
After nearly 20 years, is it more difficult to keep pace with change?
Somewhat more difficult but it hasn’t deterred us.
The past couple of years have been our most successful yet. Our newly-launched Voxivo cloud phone system was judged ‘Best VoIP Software of 2018’ by ITSPA. Genesys awarded our professional services and omni-channel skills with ‘Purecloud Partner of the Year’ and Gold Partner accreditation in the UK. We also ramped up our technical accreditations with ISO/IEC 27001 and Cyber Essentials.
This year, we kicked off with the release of new VoxivoCX cloud contact centre and, last month, we gained G-Cloud 11 listing on the Government’s Digital Marketplace for the sixth consecutive year.
These are exciting times for Foehn customers. We can offer so much more and, this year, we re-branded the business to reflect that. As a company, we’ve grown up. With a team and turnover that have doubled in size since 2016, we’ve come a long way since we started back in 2000.
What do your brand values say about the business?
Our re-brand was an important move. We see it as an obligation to our customers and stakeholders to show who we are, what we stand for, where we’re going and what we’re doing to get there. It was Philip Kotler who said, ‘If you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity’ and, amidst the noise and confusion of a market served by some one hundred competing VoIP providers, customers want differentiation and clarity.
At Foehn, differentiation comes naturally. We constantly push ourselves to evolve and engage with changing market conditions and, in turn, that has instilled a culture of innovation and a desire to do things differently. From day one, we’ve never followed convention and we’ve always held on to the truth that innovation is the key to progress. As they say, ‘only dead fish swim with the tide’. We believe in building amazing intuitive products, enabling rapid adoption and delight for the user.
At the same time, one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s our DNA - a double helix where our belief in building software on open source foundations intertwines with an obsession for making communications intuitive to use
How is this impacting your development roadmap?
Our in-house development team has an obsession for removing complexity and making business communications simple to use. This comes together in a development strategy that focuses on customer needs in three areas: giving more control to the customer, getting more value from investment, making deployment painless. This all delivers simpler system management, putting more control in the hands of employees and managers. Our open source architecture allows easier integration with existing infrastructure and our professional services team have a track record of ensuring unified communications and contact centre projects are deployed smoothly.
How is it possible to compete with the big brand vendors?
Agility, customisation and personal service are the three weak spots in the armour of the big vendors. In turn, this can leave wanting more when it comes to responsiveness and additional features. At Foehn, we keep development in-house and build solutions around opensource architecture. Together, these factors help us stay agile and flexible when it comes to requests for integrations. Our roadmap which is driven by our customers allows for new features to be added on a monthly basis
Another advantage is to have access to a complete cloud communications platform, providing all three core systems – phone, UC, collaboration and contact centre. It’s an advantage over many vendors and it offers the end user scope for building communications and a strong working relationship around a single provider.
What is Foehn’s biggest differentiator?
A hallmark of all our systems is ease of use. We hide the complexity and, by making our systems simple to use and simple to manage, we put control where it should be - in the hands of your employees and administrators. This provides the real time control over communications required to maintain customer engagement and meet the changing demands of the modern workplace. Simple system management and configuration also mean a faster and more affordable option to hiring a third-party technician.
Making things simple isn’t easy, though, and the impact of this challenge on information technology is being witnessed today. It first became apparent a few years back when the big IT management consultancies, notably IDC, identified an explosion of IT complexity and its adverse impact on business productivity. The ‘IT Complexity Index’ came into being and the big software vendors, from IBM to SAP, started pushing out solutions to combat the problem. At Foehn, it was one of those ‘that-was-my-idea’ moments. From the beginning, we’ve built our systems and our reputation on the quest for ‘communications without complexity’.
