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Better, faster, stronger: Bdaily talks to OpenCloud

It’s Technology Week on Bdaily. We spoke to one chief executive with strong views on what the UK technology sector needs to improve, and one extremely encouraging success story.

Jeff Gordon heads up one of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK today. In fact the company’s growth rate was last recorded at 1046%, and was named in the top 20 of Deloitte’s 2012 UK Technology Fast 50, but it may not be a company that you’ve heard of.

OpenCloud started off in New Zealand in 2000, but didn’t start commercialising its product until seven years later, when it was sure it was really going to work, and be completely fail-safe. But what does OpenCloud do?

Chief executive, Jeff Gordon, explained: “We provide a platform for telecommunications operators, like Vodafone and British Telecom, to develop products that move with the times.

“Historically, most of the revenue of mobile operators came from selling voice and messaging services. The problem with that is the price point has been going down and down.

“Newer entrants like Apple and Google have started providing services that override things like SMS and voice calls- things like WhatsApp use internet data and replace SMS traffic.

“In the past operators would charge 5p a text, now services like WhatsApp come along and operators’ SMS traffic is down. So the operators are under pressure and more importantly, their business models are under pressure.”

After pre-empting this fundamental change in the telecoms industry, OpenCloud set to work on creating a platform that would allow network operators to develop services quickly and cheaply, that could compete with instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Blackberry Messenger, and make money. So why did it take the company seven years to commercialise its product?

“We do get asked, “What the hell were you guys doing for seven years?” In the telco world, if anything goes down in the network it’s really, really serious.

“In a mobile or telecommunications network, if you lose network time, it means people don’t make calls. So it’s lost revenue, and it could mean very high amounts of money when the network is down.

“We call it “five nines” in the industry; 99.999% of the time the system is going to be working. It’s specially developed to be fail-safe.”

Competing against large, established businesses like Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens, OpenCloud had a long way to go before it could make its name in the industry. After opening to the public in 2008 with just one customer, the firm has grown exponentially to have 55 customers.

After moving its headquarters to Cambridge, England, the company now operates out of Spain, Indonesia as well as its original site in Wellington, New Zealand, and serves markets in China, Brazil, Jakarta, and many more.

Bdaily asked Jeff how well he felt the UK was set up for a business like OpenCloud, in comparison to its other international locations.

“I’m afraid that today, if I were to score the UK against what I would ten years ago, I would score it much lower.

“For companies like us you need ready access to venture capital, a good talent pool, a coherent tax regime, and excellent communications through travel to be able to get to your markets, which is really critical.

“I think its a total disgrace the Government is going to fund HS2 to the tune of £33bn, and they’ve ducked the issue of air transport and the arrangements in the South East. They’ve just chickened out.

“We’re an exporting nation, and the markets we need to serve are not here in the UK, they are overseas. So access is critical.”

Aside from his vehement views on the UK Government’s infrastructure plans, Jeff did put his backing behind developments in fourth generation mobile standards, or 4G, as it is more commonly known.

“4G is already changing the way people live. It’s not just about broadband and entertainment, working habits are changing, and it’s about a fundamental change to our society.

“It’ll have a profound affect on businesses because businesses will succeed or fail on whether they can adapt their business models to the different environment this technology is going to offer.

“For OpenCloud, it’s really exciting because it means more services running on these networks, it’s even more competitive and our platform is going to be even more in demand.”

For more from Bdaily’s Technology Week, please check out: Bdaily talks IT technology; the UK tech sector: a health check; Bdaily talks to Care.com; Flying ahead in the technology sector; and the web-developers perspective; Big data in a brave new world; and the growth of the UK tech sector.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .