Virtualisation

Excell is uniquely placed, to take advantage of the fact that all the major vendors want channel partners who can help to deliver their next generation technologies to market. If you marry our core competencies and capabilities with the technology roadmap that every vendor has in the market today, which is cloud computing, virtualisation, hosting delivery mechanisms, all focused on enterprise strategies... whether it's Avaya, Mitel or Cisco, these guys are going to be looking for the channels that can take the next generation of technology to market, and there are only very few.

The appeal is down to the fact that Excell manages all aspects of its own network and can therefore offer enterprise customers the flexibility they demand. A lot of people are trying to jump onto the back of hosting. But hosting is just a delivery mechanism. It doesn't matter whether the hosting is in our datacentres or the customer's datacentres, it's about how we manage that via our National Operations Centre.

It's about uptime these days, and not trying to tie customers into break/fix maintenance contracts. Once people feel safe that they can switch on every time to reliability it becomes about how we all work together to integrate applications that will benefit the customer.