Having signed up with Wildix late in December 2019, Ocean Telecom Ltd, one of the leading providers of communications products and telecom services in East Anglia, have already risen into the TOP 100 Wildix Partners globally. Their growth has been significant since the team at Ocean were fully onboard by the end of March 2020. The value of deals they have won has justified all their hard work and commitment to the new product in less than 12 months.
Partnership value, product development and the competitive advantage of Wildix compared to other, more traditional vendors, were the topics we discussed in the interview with Giles Ecclestone, Sales Director at Ocean Telecom Limited.
“Ocean Telecom Ltd conducted an extensive and extremely thorough investigation in 2019 to select a new, flexible and competitively priced UC Hosted platform that would offer our team a genuine advantage in the incredibly competitive hosted telephony market – started Mr Ecclestone. “We looked at a number of excellent options, however when we looked at the Wildix solution with Rob (Rob Loakes, Senior Channel Manager at Wildix UK), it became immediately apparent to both our sales and technical team, that we had struck gold. Once we had seen the full extent and capabilities of the platform, we kept looking for the negatives, as it seemed too good to be true but 9 months down the line, I am pleased to say that we have yet to find any since we got our Gold Partner status.”
We asked Mr Ecclestone to comment on reasons for choosing Wildix, and the differences that stand Wildix apart from the industry competition, and he said.
“The incredible range of UC functionality and the pure simplicity of the platform made it stand apart from anything else we had seen. Since we’ve taken the solution onboard, we have been delighted with its uniqueness, its flexibility, security and ease of use. What really stands it apart is the speed and commitment of the team (R&D and Management) behind the platform to constantly improve and expand the range of what this diverse platform can deliver to our customers.”
“Quite simply, we have had a 90%+ success rate in the past 4 months where we have remotely demonstrated the Wildix solution to prospective and existing customers. Every customer immediately gets excited by the solution and what it can do. The fact that Wildix have continued to focus on delivering this platform via a partner channel and not simply copy a number of others in trying to support the end users (poorly) in a direct model, further demonstrates the collective will to be better and different. For those of us that have been in the telecoms industry for twenty years or more, adding the Wildix Hosted solution to our portfolio, has given us all a new lease of life and has made our view of the industry exciting and dynamic again.”
COVID-19 and its impact on business, value of deals in the new normality, together with Smart Working were the topics we discussed next with Mr Ecclestone, and here is what he had to say.
“We managed to get the first members of our technical team trained on Wildix just a month before the outbreak, and we had to really learn and understand the solution as a business as we went into lockdown. In April and May we were extremely busy (like most in our industry), as we support in excess of 500 business customers. We were trying to meet a wide range of remote working requirements as quickly as possible, and this gave us the perfect opportunity to introduce many customers to Wildix on a ‘try before you buy’ trial basis. From a sales perspective April and May were not very profitable, we had minimal new signed orders, but we were still flat out with support work for our customers. However, by the end of May it became clear for many of our customers that Wildix was the perfect long-term solution for their new requirements. In June, we had our best sales month ever and in the next couple of months we completed over 20 Wildix installations, which is more than double our average rate. Despite the complexity of some of these, the speed with which we are able to deploy Wildix solutions remotely has been an added bonus. We are extremely pleased with the solution and the support we get from the Wildix team; it has definitely been the right decision for us.”
“When the Pandemic started, Wildix were one of the first Hosted Providers to introduce an excellent “free business licence promotion” for its resellers to pass on to its customers in order to deliver increased flexibility and functionality for those that were struggling to adapt to the effects of the pandemic on older, less flexible platforms. They further backed this up with an excellent, innovative, finance partner scheme to enable businesses to fund new technology investment at no additional cost to the business over the first 12 months of a new contract term. Again this speaks volumes for the forward thinking initiative that is embedded in the team at Wildix UK, and demonstrates why Wildix continues to deliver fantastic solutions at affordable pricing points into the market place by removing as many obstacles to new customers as they can.”
