Keith Andrews, CEO of Integrated Research, speaks to Frost & Sullivan’s partner, Manoj Menon and research analyst, Sam Yip, about Integrated Research’s positioning in the changing telephony market.

Keith Andrews

1. IP telephony/IP Communications is riding a huge growth wave and seems to be the next focus for the enterprise. How do you see the market evolving and what does it mean for Integrated Research?

CIO’s have identified that management of the underlying IP telephony platform and infrastructure is the only way they can  effectively help their organisation deliver IP telephony quality and high availability for this business critical service.  Integrated Research helps enterprises make IP telephony behave like it did from a carrier, as a reliable utility. Enterprises are not skilled in managing telephony; a tool like our PROGNOSIS plays an important role in helping them monitor and manage their system’s performance.

2. Why is the value proposition of Integrated Research unique? What do you consider are your key business differentiators and how have they given you an edge over competition?

To date we have been deployed in around 75 per cent of Cisco’s largest deployments. We are unique because we have a product that is highly scalable. We hold the early market mover advantage and the experience as we have been managing IP telephony environments for 6 years.  We are also unique in the fact that our close competitors have been venture backed start-up businesses, but we have 18 years of extensive experience with monitoring solutions.

3. How has the end user response been to your solutions? Do you plan to add any new products and services?

We have found that bigger enterprises typically look at management tools from day one of a telephony deployment, whereas many smaller organisations do not, thus our primary target market are large enterprises. We have also proved our market to be 5,000 handsets and above as many of our competitors just can’t scale to that size of deployment. We also have a high level of adoption from growing customers who start with 1,000 – 2,000 handsets and grow to over 5,000 handsets as their networks have become more complicated and third party management tools are needed.

4. The growing deployment of WiFi and other wireless technologies make it possible for enterprise customers to now have VoIP clients on more devices. How do you see this trend manifesting? Is there an opportunity for companies like Integrated Research to benefit from this?

The industry has traditionally talked in terms of handsets. We will certainly start to see an increase in nodes, mobile devices, softphones, SIP devices and pretty much anything with an IP address as part of the network. All these devices and IP addresses will be part of our infrastructure for monitoring. This trend will make a tool like PROGNOSIS more critical than ever before.

5. What are some of the key changes in the industry that Integrated Research has witnessed over the last 12 months? How has the company aligned itself to reflect these changes?

We have seen integrators, carriers and resellers try to reinvent themselves with some sort of VoIP or telephony practice, whether consulting or management. This has certainly been in response to customer demands for this technology. In Europe and North America, traditional carriers have been fulfilling that role, however in Australia; it is still unclear on who is explicitly pursuing this business. To date, Integrated Research has been able to successfully go to market through Cisco, who is a very data centric company. Cisco typically works very closely with the data people in a business, but telephony was typically managed by the Operations people. PROGNOSIS is a very ‘operations’ friendly tool, and we have always been closely aligned with the enterprise operations people. We understand what their needs are, and what challenges they face. We make a data centric Cisco network very friendly to both operational and data focused people in an organisation.

6. In view of the dynamic nature of your business, could you briefly talk about your growth strategies? What markets do you consider to be primary markets for your company and what international markets do you consider key for both present and future growth?

We have recently increased our focus on the Asia-Pacific region as this region has the potential to contribute a significant amount to our VoIP business. Asia-Pacific has been 2-3 years behind North America and Europe so we will begin to see further uptake of our solutions in the coming financial year. Another key growth strategy is to provide multi-vendor compatibility, as our solution doesn’t discriminate vendor types but rather sees devices as endpoints. Finally, we are seeing the mid-market begin to open up to IP telephony monitoring solutions. Most mid-market businesses are using vendor packaged management tools, however, as their infrastructure becomes complicated and more users are added to the network, there will be a need for a highly scalable multi-vendor third party application like PROGNOSIS.

7. How do you envision the future of the IP Communications market? What role should we expect Integrated Research to play in shaping the future of this market?

Our product can run on all main operating systems that exist in enterprises today. Video and applications will require some level of monitoring, as would any device or endpoint attached to a communications system. Anything with an IP address will be part of our monitoring, so network complexity will equal our success.

8. Where do you see Integrated Research in the next 5 years? What kind of product innovations and market leadership can we expect from Integrated Research in the coming years?

I see our VoIP business growing larger than our traditional business, and along that journey, to be part of the largest deployments in the world, which we are on our way to achieving. The key reason for being part of large deployments is not just about license revenues, but rather, this segment values our technology the most. They crave the scalability and the multi-vendor capability of our product. I also think that in the next 5 years, we will get our payback for being one of the first movers in the market with our technology. We will have a lot of early adopters, trials, and pilots growing into larger enterprises with growing needs, which we will be able to fulfil with PROGNOSIS.

9. What would you like for your partners and investors to know about Integrated Research? Is there any message to enterprises that are deploying IP Solutions?

We are the product of choice for deployments of 5,000 handsets and above, or sites that are geographically disbursed. We are also experienced in deploying our product to smaller growing businesses. We have over 18 years experience in dealing with mission critical environments and 5 years with IP telephony. For partners, we help them deploy major deployments faster and support their customer base better. For investors, we have a strong history of growth and profit. The opportunity that Integrated Research has in the IP telephony space will really drive revenue growth faster than ever seen in the history of the company.