After a busy 12 months that included naming a new head of strategic partnerships, acquiring local cloud comms provider Channel UC and partnering with UCaaS wholesaler FoneSense, Access4 is now looking to shores anew to bolster the business.
The Australian cloud communications company recently bought UK-based telecoms provider Luminate Wholesale in the first expansion into the European market for the nearly decade-old company.
Access4 CEO Tim Jackson, speaking to techpartner.news after wrapping up a series of roadshows, said one of the main reasons for expanding into the UK is the analogue copper landline network shutdown and the end of the country’s Public Switched Telephone Network by the end of January 2027.
“What we went through with our own copper shutdown here was a catalyst for people to be able to get on to VoIP technologies and digital technologies because of the fibre bandwidth, so we've got to 2027 in the UK now to really harness that,” he said.
Jackson said that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to the company’s proprietary provisioning and management platform SASBOSS for partners to tap into in the UK – a market that totalled around close to 12,000 MSPs in 2024 – so the country was naturally the “next ladder” in Access4’s growth strategy.
“We didn't want to get to the end of saturation in ANZ and then look to expand and start again; we want to run that in parallel,” he said.
“Part of acquiring Channel UC and getting their talent in [the company] was making sure that we had enough skills in that executive layer to be able to go and play in one, two or three [different] regions."
Matt Milne, the company’s chief revenue officer who joined via the Channel UC buy last year, said that a lot of the company’s partners either already have business in the UK or have aspirations to expand but don’t have the capital to do so, thus Access4’s investment in the region creates a ‘bridge’ for channel partners.
“Not only is it a huge opportunity for us to capture a lot of those MSPs from the incumbent, but it gives a great segue for Australian and New Zealand partners to enter this market once we've set up our infrastructure for them to do business here,” he said.
Locally, the company saw its partners increase from 404 in 2023 to 559 by the end of 2024 (up by 38%), while over the same period, customers rose to 15,963 (up by 53%) as Access4 now boasts an employee headcount of 135.
“Vertical integration is huge”
Jackson said trying to blend AI and analytics is still a big issue Australian partners are facing.
With Access4 in possession of close to 10 years of data, millions of lines of logs and codes and a knowledge of “what good configurations look like across different verticals”, the company is keen to be a ‘support mechanism’ for partners.
“We see a lot of AI that proposes to do stuff, but the delay it has in trying to find a result, or in customer experience, or in the return of inaccurate results, is nearly the anti-CX experience." - Tim Jackson, Access4 CEO
“Vertical integration is huge - we have had more partners in our community come to us in the last 12 months saying, ‘how do I specialise in a vertical, or maybe three verticals?’,” he told techpartner.news.
“Another thing we’re hearing, which has been on the roadmap for a bit, is IoT, because we can get eSims and IoT sensors and all that sort of stuff pumping that information back into our platform, but how do you get all these inputs to be able to process that information and be able to act on it?”
As well as a recent investment of “a significant amount of money” to process unstructured data into structured data and be able to present it back through the Access4 platform, Jackson also revealed that the company is currently building an AI bot, with a projected go-live date of before June.
Alongside this, Milne also said the company is planning to launch the Access4 Academy towards the end of this financial year, with the learning resource set to focus strongly on partner enablement,
“Addressing things like that skills gap, but also educating the partner at a sales enablement level, how to qualify these opportunities around CX and UX and identify these opportunities,” he said.
“We're a lot more relevant now that we have all these integrations into CRMs, into call recording, into analytical software, so the conversation around just being a voice player quickly transcends into a whole of service offering with deep and meaningful integrations.”
Given Access4’s product portfolio – which comprises of hosted voice, UCaaS and CCaaS offerings, along with the SASBOSS platform - Jackson said that the ability to be more proactive as a service provider in identifying and avoiding customer experience issues is one of the primary ways the company is currently using AI.
“The last thing we want to do is be reactive around it, so our ability to build AI tech into our platform to help partners be more accurate and successful in the delivery of service is really key for us,” he told us.
“We see a lot of AI that proposes to do stuff, but the delay it has in trying to find a result, or in customer experience, or in the return of inaccurate results, is nearly the anti-CX experience.
“The next generation will be CPaaS-type stuff, which is how do you actually integrate platform-based AI technology, so it can take multiple feeds in from multiple different mediums, but also then respond back out in multiple different mediums from different CX platforms?”
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
