Established in 2009, SIPHON (now part of the Nuvias Group) supports service providers and resellers launching innovative cloud telephony services to create integrated, centralised platforms. The company’s unique skill set and experience has put it at the forefront of innovation, and helped its channel partners deliver a fully unified communications (UC) experience to their customers.

“We recognised the emergence of cloud-based UC and saw that smaller, more agile service providers would be the ones to achieve rapid success in a small and evolving market,” explains Steve Harris, co-founder and managing director at SIPHON. “But we also realised that their ambitions could be thwarted by their lack of technical expertise and integration experience.”

With an initial investment of £81K and a £150K grant from the Welsh Assembly, SIPHON was established to help these companies deliver new and disruptive UC offerings across Europe. In 2012, it added distribution capabilities via the acquisition of VCOMM UK.

“VCOMM was complementary in terms of adding new areas of business to our portfolio, but it was fundamentally a very different business operation, and it required us to change the way we operated in terms of our internal systems and processes,” says Steve. “It spurred us to evolve internally so we could scale to support growth. That included early completion of the latest ISO27001 certification and automating our internal systems so that over 70% of our orders can be processed, provisioned and fulfilled automatically.”

Headquartered in Cwmbran, and with offices in Newbury and in Oud-Beijerland in the Netherlands, SIPHON is focused on operating as a nimble and customer-centric company with a strong ethos of integrity, responsibility and transparency.

With an eye on emerging market opportunities, SIPHON has built up a Microsoft UC Practice, achieving Microsoft Gold Partner status. Team members work alongside cloud service providers and IT resellers, looking to help tap new revenue streams in addition to mainstream Microsoft offerings with Office 365 and Skype for Business.

The company has built a video and collaboration portfolio to support partners offering enriched UC experiences, in preparation for the significant growth opportunities it anticipates in this field, due to the increased prevalence of fibre, 4G and high bandwidth internet connectivity across the UK.

“A broader solution focus has required senior talent leaders. We strongly encourage our people to take charge of their professional development and further themselves so that, where appropriate, we can resource these senior roles from within the company,” says Steve, adding that growing brand recognition for SIPHON was making it easier for the company to recruit externally.

SIPHON is looking to double its revenues again by 2019 through a strategy that includes expansion across EMEA. The company’s recent acquisition by Nuvias Group gives it access to sales teams in 20 new EMEA markets. Positioning and promoting the SIPHON UC value proposition, alongside other Nuvias Group company offerings, looks set to further the company’s ambition to become the leading UC technology enabler in Europe.