Amcom revenue soars on cloud

Perth-based listed telecommunications provider Amcom has had a strong year, reporting a revenue jump of 43 percent, to $80.1 million, and earnings up 16 percent to $19.2 million.

“This is the tenth year in a row we have reported 20 percent year on year growth,” said Amcom chief executive Clive Stein. “We’re gearing up for the next ten years.”

Key to Amcom’s growth is its cloud business.

“For us it’s what we call X-as-a Service,” said Stein. “We want to make everything possibly available as a service.”

Next cab off the rank in the everything-as-a-service is wifi-as-a-service, he said, with equipment in a central location, and managed on behalf of clients.

The strongest part of the company’s business is telephony-as-a-service. Stein said enterprise is increasingly focused on offloading infrastructure and allowing internal IT departments to focus on applications.

“There’s a steady uptake and the market is looking at IaaS seriously,” he said. “We have a large deployment of telephony as a service though our BroadSoft subsidiary. It has 100,000 end points and fits the mid market well.”

At the high end, serving government and large scale enterprise, is the recently announced deal seeing Amcom delivering Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) into the marketplace.

“Cisco has a tremendous share of the enterprise market, but currently it’s an on premise platform,” Stein noted. “Cisco sees the hosted solution is where the market is going in the future.”

HCS is essentially a cloud-based unified communications suite. Amcom will supply it to enterprise clients over its national network.

The HCS suite offers video, messaging and presence, among other features, and is configurable for bring your own device (BYOD) focused customers.

Stein said it was the acquisition of L7 Solutions around 12 months ago which brought Amcom into a deeper relationship with Cisco. L7 was a Cisco Gold Partner.

He also added Amcom is always in the market for new acquisitions, and noted the dynamic nature of Australia’s telecoms market.

“Having said that,” he added, “our growth has always been organic.”