Market trends

2020 was the year of cloud-based business, and domestic communications services. The move to more home and remote working driven by the pandemic, accelerated a trend that had been under way for many years. The key benefits of cloud-based business communications are:

• Flexible delivery of the service to the end user, in an office / at home / on the move
• Scalability of the service to support peaks and troughs of usage as the business requires
• Business continuity – always available communications regardless of the circumstances
• Commercial flexibility – pay for what you need on a monthly basis

Cloud-based business communication services have come into their own during these uncertain times, and increased the awareness across all business markets of the benefits of cloudbased services.

The market opportunity of adoption is still mainly untapped across the UK and European markets that Gamma operate in, with less than 30% market adoption even in the most “advanced “ countries.

Gamma response:

As one of the leading providers of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS ) in Europe for over 10 years, Gamma is well positioned to support businesses looking to transition to a more flexible cloud-based business communications service.

Gamma supports businesses in that transition with a range of solutions and services tailored to fit the customers’ short-term and long-term requirements.

During 2020 we have enhanced our Horizon Collaborate service to support customers looking to move to a full collaboration service for their internal and external communications requirements.

In addition, we have supported tens of thousands of users looking to fully enable their investment in Microsoft Office / Teams, providing value added services to the Teams environment to ensure the power of Teams was fully enabled. This service development was built on the combination of the acquisition that we made of Exactive in 2020, and the Gamma market leading SIP trunking service.

The continued development of the UCaaS services is at the core of the Gamma product development roadmap, as we look to enhance our services across all our target markets.

Customers want to contact businesses and organisations how they want to, not how the business may want to steer them!

With customers now looking to engage with all businesses in a more digital way (or at least having the option to engage that way) all types and sizes of organisations need to embrace a model that supports multiple customer contact methods in an integrated / structured way.

The technology that supports this integrated customer contact model has been deployed in large scale B2C contact centres, but the adoption and requirement of these services is now accelerating in all size businesses. It is becoming critical to have a multiple contact medium strategy to generate leads and improve customer satisfaction – the lifeblood of all businesses.

Gamma response:

Gamma acquired Telsis in 2019 to form the basis of our customer contact platform strategy. This platform that combines customer contact from calls, email and web chat fully integrated into our Cloud PBX and Collaboration services provides a customer contact platform for all sizes of businesses, but is especially targeted at SMEs by providing a simple to configure service for smaller businesses at a price point that works for their business.

Horizon Contact was launched in March 2021 with an extensive roadmap of functionality and integrations to meet the demands of all the Gamma target routes to market.

In March 2021 Gamma acquired Mission Labs which will allow Gamma to enhance and expand its cloud contact centre technology.

Key to supporting the take up of cloud applications is the provision of high bandwidth, high availability and secure connectivity, regardless of whether that connectivity is provided to a business, home or user location via fixed or mobile access means.

Bandwidth and connectivity to provide uninterrupted and consistent access to the cloud-based business communications application is now the expected norm for business users and their clients. Whether that is to support a video conference or share an online document, to do it efficiently needs reliable and scalable connectivity.

Gamma response:

As a UCaaS provider born out of a Telco, Gamma appreciates that the application quality is only deliverable when the complete connection chain is optimal.

That is why Gamma provides packages of fixed and mobile connectivity to support customers accessing the Gamma applications and all other critical applications for the customer.

Gamma delivers a range of technologies to fit the end customer requirements from single fibre broadband services through to multisite Wide Area Network solutions using the latest SD WAN technologies.