Interview

FMC Transformation

Fresh off Tango Networks acquisition of Simetric Comms Business spoke to Andrew Bale, GM of cloud services at Tango, and Gavin Sweet, Director of Simetric about what this deal means for the Channel.

David Dungay: Can you give us the background to the deal?

Gavin Sweet (GS): If we have been in a zone for about the last 18 months where we have been looking for some type of investment. What came apparent when we started working with Tango Networks was they would be good bedfellows. The combined offerings will integrate “mobile native” voice, text and data communications with enterprise telephony and applications. That innovation will give enterprise customers a ubiquitous, global communications fabric, covering all employees in any location.

David Dungay: What does this mean for you Gamma arrangement?

Andrew Bale (AB): Both parties had been talking to Gamma for a long time around how we can exploit their relationship with Three. We are now Gamma’s exclusive partner to provide their 1200 partners with mobile services. That product will be coming out in early 2019. There is hunger in the market to properly integrate mobility with their UC platforms and no one is really coming forward with an easy to use and integrated, and support service.

GS: All those guys plugging in Gamma SIP trunks to their various endpoints (which there are a lot) can use this solution. Tango have given us network elements which makes our technology stack even easier to use for the UK UC guys. We are essentially allowing a SIM to register dynamically as a user on any PBX anywhere. We are taking all the interop work out of it and delivering it as a standard provisioning exercise.

AB: In the UK we have about 500,000 seats on hosted PBX’s and there is probably less than 20,000 mobile phones tied to them. The market is ripe for transformation. This could be the next big transformation of the UC market and I would expect to see a big turnaround over the next 18-24 months in how people use their hosted platforms as a result.