Locked EN (Press): Swyx International Partner Conference 2015

[Tom Wellige]

Wednesday the 21st October marked the date that unified communications vendor Swyx held its annual International Partner Conference at the historically located Runnymede Hotel in Egham. As well as some key product announcements to its future-proofed SwyxWare system including its new Skype for Business connector and plans for integration with wearables, Swyx also celebrated the achievements of its channel partners as part of its annual awards.

Welcoming resellers from the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, France and Iceland, Swyx CEO Ralf Ebbinghaus began the day with a round-up of Swyx’s latest impressive growth figures, future strategy and the importance of its international partners as part of its on-going expansion. He commented, “Although Swyx is of course a German company renowned for its innovation and high quality engineering, we are also committed to substantially growing our international base. Our vision is to provide our partners with a choice of both on-premise and cloud solutions that are cost-effective to both deploy and support, translating into higher profits and margins for our partners. In the future we plan to be able to offer our cloud-based solution, delivered at scale, for a competitive cost price of 1 cent/month/user.”

Key products unveiled at the event included Swyx’s Connector for Skype, a new Mac Client, new clients for iphone, Android and Windows 7, easier integration with support of REST API and the company’s new DataCentre Advance platform that will reduce infrastructure and operational costs for cloud partners.

“It’s all about the user”

Swyx’s CTO, Joao Gonzaga provided an insight into Swyx’s future roadmap that included ‘sensor-enabled technology’ allowing Swyx to be integrated into wearables, stressing that, “this is not slideware, these are real products that are currently being prototyped to be released within the next two years. The main focus for the direction of our product is that it’s all about the user. That’s why we with our latest announcements have focused on what is most popular with our partners‘ customers including the ability to add to full telephony to Skype for Business and new mobile clients for commonly used operating platforms. We are also aware that not all customers will want to move to the cloud, so offering the choice of on-premise or hybrid is also essential. The design of our new softphone interface is also a response to feedback from our partners and customers.”

Channel Awards 2015

The following awards were jointly presented by Swyx Sales Director Marco Crueger and Swyx International Cloud Manager, Michael Hostbaek to recognise achievements by partners in the UK, France, Netherlands, Sweden and Iceland.

• TOP Partner UK 2015: Elite Telecom
• TOP Performer UK 2015: Smart Solutions GRP Ltd.
• TOP Cloud Partner Netherlands 2015: OZMO
• TOP Cloud Partner Netherlands 2015: Adfocom Automatisering B.V.
• TOP Cloud Partner Iceland 2015: SVAR taekni ehf.
• TOP Cloud Partner Sweden 2015: Teleoffice AB
• TOP Cloud Partner France 2015: Appliwave

Feedback from UK Partner

Simon Daniell, Head of Corporate Sales at Swyx Gold Partner Elite Telecom and winner of the Swyx TOP UK Partner of the Year Award 2015, commented, “We are delighted to have won performer of the year for the third time. This is testament to the pivotal part that Swyx plays in our overall business strategy which is to provide our customers with a wide choice of highly tailored communications solutions. We were also impressed by Swyx’s latest announcements such as their telephony plug-in for Skype for Business that will really help us to retain and attract new business. Swyx’s future roadmap for cloud also demonstrated that we have chosen the ideal partner for delivering UC as a service from our own datacentres that minimises our operation costs but maximises our recurring revenue potential.”

Managing Director at Swyx Gold Partner, EBC, Richard Lane who attended the conference commented, “Excited to hear about some of the new features that will make it even easier to sell and deploy Swyx. The key highlights for us were the Swyx Connector for Skype that enables us to target any existing Lync or 365 users with an affordable telephony option, the SwyxWare Advance datacentre product that will make it even more cost-effective to host and re-sell Swyx’s cloud-based UC via our own Midlands based datacentre and also the new Mac client that will enable us to approach the growing number of sectors that are moving to Apple environments.”

Feedback from other European partners

Runar Sigurdsson, Owner at Svar based in Reykjavik who was recognised with a Top Cloud Partner 2015 Award commented, “We are really happy to receive this award that reflects the great sales success we have achieved with Swyx that is truly the driving force behind our business. 98% of our customers are using softclients and mobile phones as their communication devices on a recurring revenue model. Swyx supports this demand perfectly with its feature-rich cloud platform and smartphone clients including Android and iPhone. We are already installing the new Swyx Connector for Skype which together with the newly announced Mac Client will enable us to open many more new doors in the future.”

Nicolas Beslin, General Manager at Appliwave based in Paris, who was recognised by Swyx with a Top Cloud Partner 2015 Award commented, “It is very encouraging for us to win this award. We started to sell Swyx just a year ago after a comprehensive benchmarking process that concluded that it was the best product on the market for our target market of SMBs. We loved the ease of use, design and the many features. In particular because France is fairly traditional when it comes to its use of voice with a 50/50 split between deskphones and softphones, we really appreciated the fact that Swyx’s cloud product shows the company’s expertise of both the telephony and IT worlds and meets the real needs of users, which is crucial. It was also good news to hear Swyx’s plans for its future datacentre platform that is VPN-less and multi-tenanted as this will help to simplify infrastructure and decrease our operational costs moving forward.”

Erik Eskilsson, CEO at TeleOffice AB based in Stockholm, who was recognised by Swyx with a Top Cloud Partner 2015 Award commented, “We are delighted to receive this award and it is always nice to be appreciated. It is a highly competitive and mature market in Sweden when it comes to communications as a service, in fact to be honest it is here where the concept was first invented. Therefore when we researched the market, we knew we need to find the best product to succeed. With Swyx we have found such a solution as it is open, non-proprietary, windows-based and can be easily integrated with a wide range of other subscription-based applications. We sell mostly cloud but it is also good to have the option of on-premise if that is preferred by the customer – with Swyx we can offer both. What we also like about Swyx is that they are listening to their partners and developing killer features that our customers are asking for. For us the new Swyx Connector for Skype is key, because in the future Skype will be as common as Outlook, so we can see a huge demand for this. The announcements around the introduction of a REST API were also welcome as this just makes it faster and easier to integrate Swyx with other applications without programming skills. The new clever design of the Swyx client will also help us to sell more systems in the future. It is wonderful to be partnered with such an experienced vendor that is in tune with the future demands of the market."