Solwise, based in Hinckley, Leicestershire, provides solution driven telecommunications services to the SME market, including carrier pre-selection, line rental, broadband and other bespoke services. Solwise has approximately 600 active business customers with a significant amount of its income and gross margin coming from monthly recurring business. The acquisition of Solwise will create cross-selling opportunities into the current Pinnacle SME customer base and in return will enhance the Solwise customer proposition.
Solwise is also an Internet Service Provider (ISP), and has a data centre in Brighton with connectivity into Telehouse North in London. It is envisaged that this will bring Pinnacle additional benefits and cost savings, once the data centre in Brighton is connected to the Pinnacle ISP and data centre in Paisley.
Commenting today Alan J Bonner, Chief Executive of the Company, said, “I am delighted that we have completed the all share acquisition of Solwise Telephony and Sipswitch. This is the second all share acquisition we have completed in the past seven months, which I believe once again confirms the vendors’ confidence in Pinnacle. The businesses have offices in Leicestershire and Brighton, which helps to further expand our operations outside of Scotland. Solwise brings to Pinnacle an excellent team of people and its business is highly complementary to Pinnacle, giving us an additional 600 business customers, to which we can cross-sell Pinnacle services that are currently unavailable to Solwise, such as business mobile bundles and, through Sipswitch, ownership of a range of next generation IP solutions.
The Sipswitch VoIP platform gives us all the functionality we require to market a carrier grade, next generation hosted telephony platform, providing us rapid deployment, without the considerable cost of further developing new features into the existing Pinnacle VoIP platform. It is the intention of the Company to migrate the Pinnacle VoIP customers onto the Sipswitch platform over time. This will give our customers a rich feature set, which, through an intuitive web interface, allows customers to control inbound and outbound call routing, audio conferences, call recording and voicemail management.
We are looking forward to working with the Solwise team, all of whom are staying with Solwise post completion. Introducing earn out provisions through to 30th September 2011 will ensure that the team work diligently to build the business over time, and I am delighted that they have shown their faith in Pinnacle by accepting their total consideration in shares at the mid-market price, without discount.
Cross-selling multiple services to our customers is a key feature of our strategy which will be enhanced by this acquisition. We intend to build on our strategy of expanding the Company through bolt-on, well priced, opportunities; thereby enhancing our services, particularly through the deployment of new generation IP based solutions, as well as strengthening our organic growth capabilities.”
It is the intention of the Company that its preliminary results for the year ended 30th September 2009 will be issued before the end of February 2010, and, in due course, full details will be made available on the Company’s new website at www.pinnacletelecomgroup.co.uk