Telappliant, an award-winning provider of cloud communications solutions and VoIP services recently announced their acquisition of Orbtalk – a UK-focused hosted telephony provider. Telappliant has more than 15 years of experience in the UK SME space, and they focus primarily on helping small to mid-sized businesses grow with a range of unique managed services, connectivity solutions and more.
Telappliant has built a name for itself over the years, serving customers ranging all the way from small businesses to blue-chip innovators. With the acquisition of Orbtalk, the VoIP expert is well-positioned to continue growing their position as a talented UK provider of end-to-end integrated communication solutions. This founding member of the Internet Telephony Services Providers Association (ITSPA) has a passion for delivering reliability, scalability, and quality in all their offerings, so I was keen to learn more about the Orbtalk acquisition and what it means to Telappliant’s future.
I caught up with Muhammad (Mo) Nasim, the Managing Director of Telappliant to find out what the acquisition means to them, and where the company is heading next.
Tell Us About Telappliant?
Muhammad told me that Telappliant first began in 2003, back in the days when the concept of Voice over IP was still finding its feet. “Originally, we started off with the distribution of hardware, but we quickly decided that we needed to switch our focus to the “services” side of things if we wanted to really make a difference. We set up a sort of free VoIP service and used that to start driving interest from our customers in what VoIP had to offer. Once the market was excited, we began to provide a hosted PBX product.”
Telappliant has never been a company that placed all its eggs in one basket. They knew from day one that they need to be diverse and forward-thinking if they wanted to preserve their place in the market. Today, they’re still optimising and improving their highly resilient network to support better VoIP delivery, and stronger scalability with countless value-added services.
“Focusing on VoIP and hosted PBX meant we could build the business on recurring revenue and contracts while decreasing our dependency on hardware.”
What Makes the Orbtalk Acquisition Special?
The Orbtalk purchase isn’t the first acquisition that Telappliant has made. A few years ago, they made their first acquisition of a connectivity business in Manchester, and Muhammad told me that they learned a thing or two from that experience.
“We were founded in 2003, and from 2008 onwards we’ve been trying to put our eggs in several baskets instead of relying on telephony alone. We want to get to a point where we can offer UK SME’s with between 10 and 100 employees a bundle of services, complete with connectivity, telephony, and hosted services, as well as extra IT and cloud solutions on top of that.”
“The first acquisition we made wasn’t much of a risk for us, we didn’t use finance for it, or take much out of our pockets, but we weren’t as diligent as we could have been with the post-acquisition integration plan.”
Muhammad noted that Telappliant had taken the lessons they learned from the previous acquisition and implemented it into the Orbtalk deal to make it work.
For Telappliant, an acquisition of Orbtalk makes sense, as the two companies already have strong connections with each other, and a lot of synergies regarding suppliers, target markets, and even technical skills.
“They also had some interesting things to offer, like a portal that automates provisioning and sales in a very attractive way.”
What Does Orbtalk Bring to Telappliant?
Muhammad noted that the acquisition of Orbtalk simply made sense from a financial perspective, but the decision went beyond that too.
“There’s quite a lot of automation on the Orbtalk platform, and provisioning is pretty much automatic for SIP trunks all the way through to hosted voice. They also have a great roadmap that looks at provisioning underlying infrastructure too.”
Ultimately, the USP of Telappliant and the potential of Orbtalk work together fantastically well. When overlaid together, the two companies complement each other exceptionally well.
“The other attractive thing about Orbtalk is that they were already using some intelligent outsourcing strategies that we found very compelling and sensible. They’re bringing a lot of skill and innovation into the mix. While the financial core of the deal was based on how attractive the company’s contracted revenue was, we were very keen to investigate the added bells and whistles too. That’s ultimately how you get bigger and bigger as a business.”
How Does Telappliant Plan to Grow More in the Future?
I was keen to hear where Telappliant felt their path would be taking them next. The first thing Nasim told me was that they were already on the lookout for more acquisitions. Though they’re going to wait for the Orbtalk purchase to settle before they throw any more money into the ring “Tan Aksoy, one our founding directors is dedicated to helping us find acquisition opportunities. We’re actively looking for our next buy.”
Outside of acquisitions, Telappliant is focused on becoming the “best” at something. Muhammad told me:
“If you want to be the best at something, you want to narrow the scope of what you want to excel at. We want to be the leading provider of managed telecoms and IT services for UK services and SMEs featuring between 10 and 100 employees. “
Nasim said that up until now, the SME sector hasn’t been sufficiently segmented, companies with between 10 and 100 employees want the same thing as any enterprise: a range of services but they want this through a trusted partner rather than maintain an expensive in house procurement process. Telappliant believes that they can fill the gap in the market, and they’ll be using acquisitions like Orbtalk to help them do that.
