ICUK believes this unusual foundation of the organisation is behind its success, continuing to grow significantly year on year, without the need for sudden expansion through acquisitions.
The lack of ‘sales people’ may account for why ICUK is often incorrectly perceived as small, or a reseller themselves; with over 100,000 end users and a large core network, it is far from the case.
Paul Barnett, Founding Director of ICUK said “After the first couple of years of working in the reseller industry it became apparent there was not an existing supplier who met our ideals, hence the journey began to do it ourselves.
It is the memories of those first two years that continue to drive the constant development of our platform, ensuring our resellers never face the frustrations we did, we have always believed if we can make something better, the sales will naturally come, and they have.“
To mark the 15th birthday the Directors of ICUK financially rewarded every employee for their continued commitment to the business. Leslie Costar, Founding Director added “Our team is everything; all our existing channel partners will know just how dedicated and knowledgeable our support staff are. In addition, our development team are very much the unsung heroes of ICUK, who dedicate every working hour to taking the platform to the next step, ensuring our channel partners always have the upper hand in the industry.”
Not forgetting the lifeblood of the company, ICUK wanted to reward its channel partners with an exciting way to gain new customers and to enable them to compete in the retail market, so version 15 of the Control Panel now offers free PSTN and ADSL activations in addition to the usual plethora of new features and enhancements that comes with each new release.
Neil Barnett, Head of Business Development, commented “A common barrier for partners are the upfront installation costs with telephone services and broadband, especially when attracting new customers who might be on a tight budget. Our new free line rental installation and broadband offer eradicates this problem, and gives our partners the edge over many of their competitors, including some of the larger players out there.”
To coincide with this offer, the company has been expanding its network infrastructure, with its MPLS core recently upgraded to
20Gbps. Tim O’Donovan, Technical Director of ICUK, explains “We’ve added additional POPs in Central London, which has given us access to more carriers and greater capacity. In 2016, we plan to continue this expansion - allowing our partners and their end users to be able to tap into the best possible resources for their broadband, hosting and Ethernet connectivity. With more on the way, it’s most certainly an exciting year for ICUK.”