Azzurri to offer 'five nines' with new datacentre

Azzurri says fourth node will improve uptime for customers at a time when cloud-based unified comms is taking off

Azzurri Communications says it will soon be in a position to offer its cloud-based unified communications (UC) customers "five nines" of availability with the opening of a fourth datacentre.

Azzurri CTO Rufus Grig told CRN that the comms integrator plans to open a fourth node on its ICON Communicate managed UC platform in North London in April or May.

The investment comes as Azzurri talked up the shift it is seeing in its client base from traditional on-premise to managed and hosted unified communications.
It claimed more than 80 per cent of end-points in its pipeline now sit in ICON Communicate, which it launched in May 2014.

The additional datacentre will run a new Avaya cloud service Azzurri is set to launch next month but is also designed to improve downtime associated with its services in this area. Grig said it could now offer 99.999 per cent availability, equating to 5.26 minutes of downtime a year.

"Most of the UCaaS services you buy will be on three nines of availability," he said. "We are already able to offer four nines, but some of our more demanding customers wanted us to be able deliver five nines. This will take us up to five nines."

Having seen revenues fall for several years, Azzurri is gearing up to release its latest annual numbers and Azzurri CEO Chris Jagusz (pictured) said the emphasis is increasingly on gross profit rather than sales.

"Selling traditional PBXs gave you a really nice headline revenue figure. But now we're seeing customers buying a service over time, so rather than invoicing £1m upfront we might be invoicing £250,000 a year for it over five years," he said. "As you start shifting to a subscription model your earnings become of a much higher quality, which is why we're putting the emphasis on the management of margins, rather than the headline revenue figure."

Hosted or managed UC now accounts for the "vast bulk" of major new projects with both existing customers and new logos, Grig added.

"I've been very surprised with how quickly our pipeline has moved," he said. "Icon Communicate is now where north of 80 per cent of our pipeline sits in terms of end-points."

Azzurri recently launched Skype for Business in its cloud and Avaya is set to be added next month, Grig said.

"I cannot think of another provider who has three different major vendor offerings available as a cloud and managed services," Grig said. "We are able to offer virtually three quarters of a Gartner Magic Quadrant, with Mitel, Microsoft and Avaya."

Jagusz added: "The virtue of an integrator like us is having more than one supplier relationship we can migrate customers from one platform to another at the time they're ready to do it, and that's particularly the case for Skype for Business."