KCOM Group says rebrand is a growth play

Smart421, Kcom, Eclipse and KC brands will cease to exist on 4 April; CEO says rebrand reflects fact that all four businesses are now about delivering IP-based services

KCOM Group CEO Bill Halbert claims the IT and comms provider's decision to move to a single brand is about growth rather than cost-cutting, and reflects the fact its entire business is increasingly about delivering IP-based services.

The London-listed firm announced this morning that its four existing brands - Smart421, Kcom, Eclipse and KC - will cease to exist on an operational basis on 4 April, with everything rebranded as KCOM.

KCOM Group has seen sales shrink in recent years but CEO Bill Halbert claimed the firm is moving back onto the front foot following the £90m sale of its physical network assets, which he said has left it debt-free.

He said adopting one brand would benefit customers by allowing the firm to amass economies of scale across skills groups previously siloed across the four separate businesses.

"We want customers to enjoy the resources of the whole business and increasingly the whole business is about delivering IP-based services," Halbert told CRN.

"We might have people working on behalf of an individual residential consumer in Hull but what they are doing is delivering aggregated IP-based services," he said.

"On the other extreme, for very large enterprises, such as HMRC, we have delivered a cloud-based contact centre. They may look very different, but they're both based on aggregating IP-based services together."

KCOM Group saw revenues fall six per cent to £348m in its last financial year and employs roughly 2,000 staff. Consumer ISP arm KC generated £95.7m of that total, with SMB arm Eclipse contributing revenues of £29.6m and enterprise units Kcom and Smart421 turning over £188.8m and £30.2m respectively.

Halbert picked out BT and the big IT services providers as competitors in the enterprise space. KCOM's midmarket activities compete with BT and Azzurri, while KC, which operates only in Hull and East Yorkshire, rubs shoulders with ISPs like Sky, BT, Virgin and Talk Talk, he added.

Top management at the four brands have either moved on - as was the case with Smart421 boss Neil Miles - or found new roles in the integrated group, said Halbert, who added that there would be no job cuts or office closures as a result of the rebrand.

"We are anticipating growth," he said. "This is not an exercise in scaling back but pulling resources together to grow the business.

"We are starting to make sense of those professional skills groups we have across the business today and that gives us economies of scale in those skills groups, and makes us far more effective as far as customers are concerned."

Halbert concluded:"We now have zero debt, so we are in a really strong position to make whatever investment decisions we need to make to drive the business forward."