Evotec has acquired the customer base of rival telephony specialist Tamco. Both firms specialised in Unify, the collaboration vendor formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications.
Evotec bought the company on 18 November 2013, after which Sydney-based Tamco appointed liquidator Bruce Gleeson of Jones Partners Insolvency & Business Recovery on 18 November 2013
Paul Cooper, managing director of Evotec, told CRN that the deal added "hundreds" of new customers and ongoing services revenues.
Cooper has experience with M&A, having made three acquisition since 2001, but said "last year was unusual – I had four different companies approach and this was just one of them".
"It shows you the market is tough and the organisations that have approached us have not been in growth mode.
"It is helping us to secure the future a little bit. Without a doubt, it is a much easier way of getting new customers onboard; it is the soft approach in."
Cooper had been pleasantly surprised with the retention rate of Tamco's customers so far. "One of the concerns was we may have some level of loss but I am very pleased it has been low."
Hosted versus on-premise UC
Evotec was born as PHC Voice and Data in 1988 and now has four offices: the head office in Sydney, two in Melbourne and a site in Cooparoo, Brisbane.
It has been a Siemens partner since 1993, and is one of five of the vendor's top-tier GoForward Partners.
There is a trend away from traditional on-premise UC toward hosted solutions but Cooper is convinced the cloud is always the way to go.
Hosted is still largely a "cookie cutter" solution that might suit the SMB sector but doesn’t offer the sophistication required for bigger users.
"Customers aren't looking for plain Jane phone, they are looking for more advanced and that is best on-premise," he said.
"If someone said, 'We want to have complex video conferencing', you can do that [best] with an on-premise."
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