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.
