unified-communications
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CompassMSP Wants to Be the Only IT Number You Need
A string of acquisitions has given CompassMSP national reach. Its pitch to businesses is more personal: fewer technology handoffs, stronger security, and someone who understands what an outage costs.
Elite Group sells the part of the cloud that still needs people
The Lancashire communications provider builds its case in the awkward details: overloaded inboxes, roaming SIMs and phone systems that cannot follow staff home. Its business is making somebody else’s technology work in the real world.
Involve makes the video call fit the hospital
A working camera is only the beginning. Involve Visual Collaboration builds the rooms, waiting rooms and support services that let healthcare teams get on with the appointment.
Avoira makes the office talk to the factory floor
From two-way radios to AI call analysis, Avoira sells the connections that keep organisations working. Its most revealing projects begin with a broken meeting room, an awkward phone call or a system people have outgrown.
Cinos wants your next meeting to start on time
From Pernod Ricard’s meeting rooms to a cruise fleet’s control centre, Cinos tackles the unglamorous engineering that lets people get on with their jobs. Its best work gives users less to think about.
AVI-SPL UK & Ireland: The business behind the ‘Join’ button
A meeting room is easy to photograph and harder to keep working. AVI-SPL UK & Ireland builds the technology, trains the people and stays on call - a business that now stretches from an Edinburgh innovation lab to a coordinated European operation.
FourNet Keeps the Calls Coming When the Stakes Get Awkward
The Manchester firm began with on-premise telephony. It now sells an unusual promise: diagnose the operation first, modernise it in controlled stages, and put its fee at risk against the result.
Charterhouse Is the Plumbing Behind Britain’s Hybrid Office
The London technology group has spent three decades turning phones, networks, meeting rooms and security into one managed service. Its most persuasive product is not a box or an app - it is having one number to call when the whole stack misbehaves.
LoopUp Bet Its Future on the Least Glamorous Part of Microsoft Teams
The conference-call company watched Teams swallow its old market, then rebuilt itself around the stubbornly local business of global phone service. The result is a useful lesson in choosing the complicated problem your platform partner cannot solve alone.
Peter Lavache Would Rather Fund the Product
Avaya's chief marketing officer learned early that the best product does not automatically win. Three decades later, he still insists that marketing begins with product, customers and the unglamorous discipline of execution.
Bandwidth Built the Phone Network Your Software Forgot It Needed
Most communications software companies rent the road. Bandwidth spent decades laying its own - then turned that network into APIs for Google, Microsoft, Zoom and the coming wave of voice AI.
TPx Built the IT Sidekick for 25,000 Businesses. Then a $1.1 Billion Debt Load Became the Villain
TPx spent a quarter-century turning phone lines into an all-in-one technology service. Its 2026 restructuring reveals both the value of that model - and the price of financing growth with too much debt.
CTI’s Real Product Isn’t Screens. It’s the Moment Nothing Breaks.
The 45-location AV integrator has spent nearly four decades turning public technical failure into a private engineering problem. Its playbook is simple to describe, expensive to fake, and useful far beyond audiovisual work.
The BlueJeans Playbook: Build the Bridge, Sell for Under $500 Million, and Know When Bundles Win
BlueJeans made incompatible cameras talk, grew to 25 million users, and sold to Verizon at the precise moment video became oxygen. Its shutdown four years later is a useful warning: a brilliant bridge can still lose when the platforms on both sides become the destination.
Damovo’s $140 Million Bet on Keeping Enterprise Tech Boring - and Why Its No-Rip-and-Replace Playbook Works
Most digital transformations begin with a demolition fantasy. Damovo makes its money on the harder promise: keep the phones ringing, the network breathing and the auditors calm while old infrastructure learns new tricks.
Clear Rate’s Bet: The Best Telecom Upgrade Is One Human Who Answers
For 25 years, the Michigan provider has sold a gloriously unsexy idea: one bill, one number to call, and fewer vendors to blame. Its opportunity is the mess between national carriers - and its risk is whether local service can stay personal as the platform grows.
Shure Built the Microphone Presidents, Popes, and Podcasters All Reach For
A one-room radio-parts shop in 1925 Chicago turned into the microphone every roadie trusts and every meeting room quietly runs on. Here is how Shure spent a century refusing to go public - or to make a fragile mic.
The Company That Taught a Reed Organ to Play the 1980s
A broken schoolhouse organ in 1887 became the world's largest instrument maker. How Yamaha turned tuning forks, FM chips and player pianos into a 3-billion-dollar sound empire.
The 30-Year-Old Phone Company That Quietly Became an AI-Era IT Shop
It started as the technology arm of a regional Bell telephone company. Three decades and a private-equity buyout later, CBTS runs cloud, security, and communications for 3,000-plus businesses - and it wants to be the partner that makes its clients look good.
AB Soft
AB Soft spent more than two decades doing something unfashionably durable: building the engineering bench behind another company's communications platform. Its narrow focus is both the business's advantage and its biggest dependency.
RingCentral
The company that dragged the office phone into the cloud is now betting the whole switchboard on AI agents that answer, route, and read the room.
8x8
One company built its whole pitch on erasing the line between the phone on your desk and the call center that answers your customers. Here is how 8x8 turned four decades of telephony into an AI-driven customer-experience platform.
REVE Systems
For more than two decades, a company born in Dhaka has quietly wired the plumbing behind millions of internet phone calls - one softswitch, one dialer, one SMS gateway at a time.
XCALLY
Streamline customer interactions with AI-driven Omnichannel software
Nextiva
A phone company that decided phone calls were only the beginning. How Nextiva turned a VoIP line for small businesses into an AI platform that runs a billion customer conversations a year.
Mitel
For half a century Mitel has run the office phone. After a 2025 debt reset, the Canadian veteran is betting that hybrid - part on-premises, part cloud, part AI - is where enterprise communication actually lives.
GoTo
Powering a world of work without limits.
Dialpad
The company that turned every phone call into data is betting its future on AI agents that answer before you finish asking.
ComputerTalk
Contact Center with AI for Modern Customer Experiences
UJET Wants to Kill the Call Center Mitel Helped Build
San Francisco's UJET calls itself CCaaS 3.0 and treats the phone as an app, not a switchboard. Ottawa's Mitel spent fifty years wiring the old way - now both are racing to work out what a human agent even does once the AI picks up first.