Elite Group sells the part of the cloud that still needs people

A luxury train can cross a border more gracefully than its internet connection. Golden Eagle Luxury Trains had a particularly fiddly problem: staff were swapping local SIM cards in individual carriages as services moved between countries. Connectivity was inconsistent, local SIMs were expensive, and keeping passengers online consumed staff time. Even a very comfortable journey can acquire an irritating little chore.

Elite Group’s answer was a global connectivity package using Jola IoT SIMs, alongside Gamma office connectivity and Vodafone mobile packages for staff. The attraction was practical: stop changing cards, simplify the arrangements and give the operator somebody to contact when things went wrong. Elite’s account of the project describes support around the clock, matching a business whose working day does not end when a Lancashire office closes.

That is a useful introduction to Elite. Its customers buy communications products, but the service becomes interesting where the product catalogue ends. A train carriage, a school support desk and a fashion company’s remote workforce each make different demands on apparently familiar technology. Elite’s commercial proposition is to handle those differences.

02A phone number with a royalty attached

Founder Matt Newing traces the company’s 2000 start to an observation about royalties. Musicians and authors could earn repeatedly from work done once. He saw a comparable opportunity in memorable freephone numbers and call statistics: sell the number, charge monthly for the software and earn income as calls continued. In his account of the business’s origins, recurring revenue was the point from the beginning.

It also explains the appetite for acquisitions. Newing describes a progression from buying contracted customers and recurring income towards buying specialist capabilities. A communications customer already paying every month could become a customer for additional services. An acquired technical team brought expertise that would otherwise take time to assemble. The company expanded from telephony into a wider mix of communications and IT.

There was real financing behind that expansion. In August 2018, Elite announced a £30 million refinancing agreement with Lloyds Bank, following a review of funding options advised by Clearwater International. This was debt financing for growth and acquisitions. Sixteen acquisitions had already been completed when the agreement was reported.

03Buying expertise, then drawing a new line

The acquisition programme offers a less glamorous business lesson than its headline cheque. In a March 2019 interview, Newing said suitable businesses were the constraint. Elite wanted companies already delivering useful services, with expertise that could be expanded across a larger customer base. Having money available did not make every target attractive. The bottleneck was finding something worth owning.

That June, Elite announced the purchase of Wrexham-based MWL Systems, its seventeenth acquisition since 2008. The announcement said the deal added 40 skilled IT employees. For a company expanding its IT offering, the people were part of the product. Buying a service business means buying the ability to keep delivering its service after the signatures dry.

The seller’s later account makes the human calculation unusually visible. Some MWL shareholders wanted to retire, but management worried about the future of a team built over decades. They researched prospective buyers, narrowed the choice to three and favoured Elite’s cultural fit. Integration continued through the pandemic with individual conversations, group meetings, written updates and questions and answers. Those are procedures another acquirer can copy without a £30 million facility.

Then came a change in organisation. In March 2024, Elite announced that its IT portfolio would move to the revived Netcentrix brand from April. Elite would concentrate on cloud communications, contact centres, voice and mobile. Both businesses would sit under New Technology Group. Management’s stated reason was sharper specialist service; the announcement said the reorganisation brought no redundancies.

The distinction matters when reading older descriptions of Elite as an all-purpose IT supplier. Its current website directs managed IT, cloud computing and cybersecurity enquiries to Netcentrix. The companies remain connected, but the customer proposition now has a clearer division of labour. Breadth had helped build the business; specialisation became the argument for reorganising it.

04The inbox broke before the ambition did

RM Education’s problem was more specific than a desire to “go digital.” Its existing Anywhere365 platform had limited email capacity, crashes, disjointed systems and inadequate reporting. Supervisors also lacked workforce scheduling tools. The weakness showed up in the daily handling of customer contacts, where switching between systems and dealing with interruptions made work harder.

Elite implemented Zoom Contact Centre for 120 seats, with Zoom Workplace licences, ServiceNow integration and active and standby Gamma SIP trunks. Existing AudioCodes and Ribbon equipment was used in the deployment. A four-month delivery plan was arranged around the school summer break. The case study reports more than three months of fault-free voice service after launch; subsequent work was planned around workforce management, quality management and AI.

Jayne Henry, RM Education’s director of customer experience, praised the delivery in Elite’s published account, comparing it favourably with seven earlier migrations in her career. The telling emphasis was on the migration itself.

05Same category, different job

Other customers needed different answers. Manchester fashion business Urban Bliss wanted a phone system employees could use in the office, on the move and at home. Elite introduced Horizon Collaboration, allowing calls through laptops and mobile devices, and supplied training and support through its ServiceNow portal. The useful change was that a business call no longer required a particular desk.

For The Bradford Exchange, the issue was a telesales operation with insufficient campaign reporting and disconnected functions. Elite combined an 8×8 contact-centre platform with custom software: an Azure-based reporting suite built using APIs, showing agents and supervisors campaign information such as conversion performance and dial-to-answer rates. The deployment also included web chat, email, a progressive dialler and Secure Pay integration.

These examples show where the company’s expertise sits. Platform selection matters, but so do integration, reporting, training and operational timing. A dashboard is useful when it answers a supervisor’s actual question. A migration is useful when it fits the customer’s calendar. Neither benefit follows automatically from purchasing licences.

Elite’s current catalogue includes Zoom Phone, Zoom Workplace, Zoom Contact Centre, Mitel systems, business broadband, leased lines, SD-WAN, SIP trunks, inbound numbers, call recording and business mobiles. Its partner roster spans Zoom, Content Guru, Mitel, Gamma, BT, O2, EE, Vodafone and Jola, among others. That gives it several suppliers to work with when assembling a proposal.

“After seven other migrations throughout my career, this has been by far the best delivery of solution I have experienced.”Jayne Henry / RM Education
Customer testimonial published by Elite Group

06The bill is part of the product

GAMA Healthcare illustrates the appeal of managed service in a less theatrical setting than international rail. According to Elite’s case study, dealing directly with its previous mobile provider meant high costs, slow responses and too much internal account administration. Elite matched packages to usage, took on day-to-day account management and helped move networks at renewal when coverage and savings made that attractive.

The published result was a 30% reduction in mobile costs within the first 12 months. That is a result for this customer, under its particular starting conditions. The useful purchasing lesson is to review usage, administration and coverage together. A cheap tariff can still leave an employee spending an expensive amount of time managing it.

Elite’s Zoom Phone offer uses monthly pricing and a tailored quotation based on business requirements. Its wider model combines contracted communications services with implementation, support and, where needed, bespoke development. For a buyer, the meaningful comparison is the complete proposal: licences, connectivity, deployment work and the support commitment attached to them. A per-user figure alone does not describe the job.

This places Elite between platform vendors, network operators and customers that want help bringing the pieces together. BT and Vodafone can be alternatives for parts of the requirement, as well as participants in Elite’s supplier ecosystem. Buying directly from a platform is another route. Elite’s pitch earns its keep where coordination and ongoing account management have value to the customer.

07People are a service feature

Elite appointed Adam Turton chief executive in January 2023 after a career that began there as a graduate. His route through finance, HR, customer service and marketing gave the succession announcement some substance beyond the customary welcome. The company said he had worked on more than 15 acquisitions. Operational knowledge and deal experience arrived in the same appointment.

The company names compassion, teamwork, hard work and humility as its values, and lists Investors in People Gold among its accreditations. It also lists five ISO certifications covering quality, information security, business continuity, environmental management and occupational health and safety. Together these describe the kind of employer and service organisation it wants customers to see: structured, people-dependent and accountable over time.

For buyers, the decisive questions remain wonderfully unpoetic. Who answers when the service fails? Who owns a problem involving two suppliers? Who trains the new starters? Elite’s customer examples make those questions central to the purchase. An organisation paying for managed communications should be able to turn the answers into clear responsibilities.

08Copy the diagnosis before the shopping list

The transferable idea across these projects is to start with the irritating detail. Golden Eagle had repeated SIM changes. RM Education had email capacity problems and fragmented reporting. Urban Bliss needed calls to travel with its staff. Each problem points towards a different specification, even though all three fit under the roomy heading of business communications.

For a business weighing the same approach, the cases suggest a sequence: map the work, identify its failure points, establish the required integrations and choose a sensible migration window. Then price the service against that defined job. Training and account administration belong in the calculation because somebody will perform them, whether inside the customer’s business or outside it.

There are conditions attached. A company with a simple requirement and capable internal administrators may have less need for an intermediary. A business constrained by existing contracts may have to wait for a sensible renewal window. Combining suppliers only helps if responsibility is clear. Those are purchasing judgments, rather than promises that a particular brand of software can settle.

Elite’s most persuasive stories are small operational victories with business consequences: fewer manual changes, clearer campaign information, a manageable phone system, a lower mobile bill. In a market crowded with cloud vocabulary, that gives the company something concrete to sell. The technology can come from a familiar vendor. Making it fit still takes work.