Jan 14 2010
Solwise Telephony and Sipswitch
We are pleased to announce that we have acquired the entire issued share capital of Solwise Telephony Limited (Solwise) and its wholly owned subsidiary Sipswitch Limited (Sipswitch), for a maximum all share consideration of up to £500,000.
Rationale
Solwise
Solwise Telephony Ltd is an OFCOM registered Switchless Telecoms reseller of BT Wholesale line rentals and calls. This is great news for Pinnacle as we will now novate the Solwise lines and calls onto Pinnacle’s contract with BT, the result of which is an increase in margin because Pinnacle currently buy services at better rates than Solwise.
Solwise is also an Internet Service provider (ISP), offering broadband, domain name registration and hosting, and co-location from its data centre in Brighton and its racks in Telehouse North, London. It is also a RIPE local Internet registry providing IP networking services to businesses. It’s a member of the ISPA, and through modern equipment in Telehouse North and cross-connects, is able to offer IP Stream, Data Stream and LLU products across the UK.
Pinnacle, owns Scotland’s oldest ISP (through its subsidiary Colloquium), we have a data centre in Paisley, connected via fibre from BT, THUS, and NTL/Virgin Media. The acquisition of Solwise allows us to connect the two data centres, remove the duplication costs of running two ISP’s, and offer the Solwise customers Pinnacle's ISP products and vice versa.
Sipswitch
Over the last 7 years, Solwise has developed a hosted telephony (VoIP) product called Sipswitch, which offers call quality guarantees on specialized broadband connections. Sipswitch is a feature rich, dual functioning VoIP platform, combined with an inbound/outbound call management system. Sipswitch provides the customer with web-based management of geographic and non-geographic numbers, it also has in-built Auto-attendant/IVR, call recording, call conferencing and voicemail management.
Pinnacle has two VoIP platforms, one through our ISP and the other through our 40% ownership of Stripe 21 Ltd, however, neither of our platforms has a web based user interface, or the enhanced additional features of Sipswitch. Pinnacle’s development plan for our VoIP platform requires ongoing investment, programming, and testing, all of which costs time and investment.
The acquisition of Sipswitch gives us all the functionality we require to market a carrier grade, next generation hosted telephony platform NOW, providing us rapid deployment and removing the considerable cost of further developing new features into the existing Pinnacle VoIP platform. It is our intention to migrate the Pinnacle VoIP customers onto the Sipswitch platform over time.
The acquired businesses run operations from Hinckley, Leicestershire and from Brighton, this helps to further expand Pinnacle’s operations outside of Scotland.
Summary of benefits·:
- * Additional revenues of circa £1m per annum
- * An additional 600 business customers
- * Cross-selling opportunities
- * A carrier grade, mass-market hosted telephony (VoIP) platform
- * Two additional offices giving us greater UK coverage
- * A great team of people, and additional VoIP programming skills
- * An intuitive web based VoIP customer control panel
- * A leading-edge product to redefine our core proposition
- * An additional ISP with network in Brighton and connectivity into Telehouse, London
We are looking forward to working with the Solwise team, all of whom are staying with Solwise post completion. In summary, Solwsie and Sipswitch are highly complementary to Pinnacle allowing us to cross-sell Pinnacle services that are currently unavailable to Solwise, such as business mobile bundles, and, through Sipswitch, ownership of a range of next generation IP solutions and a fantastic hosted telephony service that brings us speed to market, which removes the considerable cost and time delay of further developing our own VoIP platform.
Alan Bonner
Chief Executive