The factors that will sustain NFON’s impressive growth are international expansion and platform scalability
LONDON, U.K. — May 24, 2017 — Based on its recent analysis of the hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) industry, Frost & Sullivan recognises NFON with the 2017 European Frost & Sullivan Award for Growth Excellence Leadership. NFON has entrenched itself in the European hosted IP telephony and UCaaS market, growing at above-market average growth rates by implementing a combination of growth diversification, high price/performance value, and compelling customer purchase and ownership experiences. Having captured a prominent position in Germany with a strong feature set and affordable pricing, it is striving to replicate this success across Europe.
The launch of NFON’s Cloud Telephone System service in 2007 enabled the company to quickly scale the leader board in its native Germany. The proprietary platform helps the provider better control costs and offer affordable communications solutions to businesses. Platform ownership further empowers the provider to innovate more rapidly and respond to changing customer requirements. Through higher margins, it allows NFON to leverage partners for broader geographic reach and greater customer support.
“NFON’s initial focus on small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) helped it capture the latent market demand for feature-rich, yet cost-effective communications solutions. Demand among SMBs remains strong throughout Europe, which creates significant opportunities for the innovative provider,” said Frost & Sullivan Vice President Elka Popova. “NFON is also striving to harness increasing demand for cloud communications solutions among larger organizations and is experiencing accelerated growth through greater average deployment size.”
“We feel truly honoured to be named Growth Excellence Leader. This shows that our expansion strategy is fully paying off. It also encourages us to pursue this strategy across Europe”, Hans Szymanski, CEO of NFON AG, explains. “This year we will open new branches in both Portugal and Italy”.
One of the core elements of NFON’s growth strategy is global expansion to ensure scalability. In addition to the German market, it has successfully launched operations in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. It will be launching services in the Portuguese market in the second quarter of 2017 and has plans to make services available in Italy. It employs a direct approach in countries such as Austria, Spain, and the UK, but has also demonstrated willingness to partner with providers such as Sunrise in Switzerland (white-label services) and Zetacom (exclusive partner) in the Netherlands.
With a roster of more than 15,000 business customers in 2016, NFON was one of the top-16 hosted IP telephony providers in the highly challenging European market. It reported a 44% growth rate in installed users, surpassing the industry rate of 25%. Its remarkable growth underlines its agility, strategy effectiveness, and ability to adapt and execute.
NFON’s growth is also the result of its excellent scalability, as its platform can serve as few as two employees to as many as 249,000. Its focus on functionality rather than account size across multiple customer segments allows it to target a larger number of businesses and customer bases. Diversifying its revenue streams and risks, it can balance shorter sales and implementation cycles in the SMB segment, with lower churn rates and greater return on sales costs in larger deployments.
“NFON’s extensive feature set, along with the flexibility of the cloud model, make NFON Cloud Telephone System a viable alternative to complex, expensive, premise-based solutions, as well as lower-end consumer voice over IP services,” noted Popova. “Web-based portal and control functions provide users and IT administrators much greater control over their communications solutions than legacy time division multiplexing-based services.”
Meanwhile, NFON has shown exemplary commitment to its partner channels by empowering them to serve customers in their respective regions and add products and services for greater customer value. Its fully redundant data centre infrastructure ensures higher service availability and is a critical factor for customer retention and service scalability.
Overall, Frost & Sullivan is pleased to acknowledge NFON’s success born of its ability to accommodate customers’ changing requirements and ensure a positive experience throughout the lifecycle of its service.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan bestows this award upon the company that demonstrates excellence in growth and customer value. It recognises the superiority of the product/service, as well as the overall customer, purchase, ownership, and service experience offered, which has resulted in the recipient company seeing above-market growth and greater share of wallet. The award lauds the growth, diversification, and sustainability strategies of the company.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognise companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
About NFON
Business communication around the world is undergoing the greatest change in its history. A modern business phone system in the cloud is an investment in the future viability for businesses of any size or industry. NFON offers unlimited capacities for the challenges faced by companies with 2 to 249,000 employees. NFON is a cloud solution “Made in Germany” and stands for data protection, reliability, and TÜV-certified voice quality. These facts together with the more than 150 intelligent features, simplicity of operation, cost effectiveness and essential security features all contribute to NFON being one of the leading provider worldwide. Operating in 12 European countries, NFON AG has its headquarters in Munich. http://www.nfon.com/
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.
Contact:
Chiara Carella
P: +44 (0) 207.343.8314
F: 210.348.1003
E: chiara.carella@frost.com
