Eve Wholesale is the new name for Eve Networks, a company with heritage stretching back to 1994 with various acquisitions shaping the business along the way.
Steve Barclay, the company’s managing director, spoke to Comms Business and explained the rebrand includes a refresh of all products and services. The new name, Barclay said, “brings the Channel front and centre of all our activity”.
Barclay added, “In preparing for this change over the last few months we have been busy not just keeping up with the market trends, but setting them. The big change started with our first acquisition and a complete restructuring of our group.
“This isn’t just a facelift. It’s a full-on transformation. We’ve expanded our technical capabilities, added cloud services to our product set and redefined our channel offering. This led to the creation of the new Eve Wholesale brand, designed to make it crystal clear what we bring to the table for resellers. This process is by no means complete and we must continue to evolve to stay ahead.”
Barclay spoke to Comms Business a few weeks after the rebrand was announced, and he reflected on the reaction both internally and externally. He said, “One of the biggest steps was to ensure that all of our people buy into [the name change] and understand what we’re doing.
“Over the last few years, we have put a lot of effort into the culture of the business and ensuring people feel valued and can express themselves. We want everybody to contribute to the business and we give a lot of freedom so that people feel confident that they can just get on and do things. They shouldn’t feel constrained by management or anything else holding them back.
“If someone has got a great idea, we want them to run with it and let us know what they’re doing. But we’re also very conscious that, as we grow, maintaining our culture is a really difficult thing to do. This rebrand has helped us on that journey.”
As for the reaction outside the business, Barclay said the response has been “phenomenal”. He added, “We are gobsmacked at the number of leads we’re getting in and the number of new opportunities that have come in.” In just four weeks, the company has signed up six new partners and three of those have already transacted with the business.
Streamlined licenses
As part of the rebrand, Eve Wholesale is streamlining its approach to licensing with its four licence options reduced to two: Prime and Base. Base includes dial tone, voicemail, call recording hunt groups and music on hold. Prime adds on full UC capability as standard, including Microsoft Teams integration.
The company is currently offering MSPs and resellers access to free licences for their cloud phone system, from now until December 2025. Licence regrades and re-signs are not included in this offer.
“The Prime license is set at a price point that will really shake up the market,” explained Barclay. “We own a big proportion of the technology stack – we’ve got our own data centres, we’ve got our own cloud infrastructure platform, we’ve got our own development team – and because the majority of what we do is in house, it means that we can be aggressive.
“We are out there to deliberately shake up the market. We want to be disruptive, and we want to get market share because we have absolute confidence in our product.”
The decision to offer partners free licences for the Eve cloud phone system until December 2025, Barclay added, was made because the team believes that once partners experience the technology and the company’s way of working with partners, they will stay.
Building around simplicity
As for the future, Barclay said the company has several “big technical projects” that are underway, including increasing its network footprint and continuing to refine the new softphone applications that were launched as part of the rebrand.
Barclay added, “In 2025, we’ve got some big, ambitious plans. There’s a whole suite of improvements that we’ll be looking at on the platform so our roadmap will be pretty busy.”
Barclay is keeping the specifics under his hat for now, but he did say we can expect to see enhancements to the voice platform and the partner portal. Those plans, Barclay explained, are centred around making everything as “simple as possible” for both users and partners.
This interview was included in our November 2024 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.