VoIP Supply Ditches Video Conferencing for Cloud PBX

After missing its revenue target by a cool $10 million, VoIP Supply decided to shutter its video conferencing division earlier this year. CEO Benjamin Sayers says that the move has helped re-energize the company’s core focus and make a pivot to the cloud.

The narrowed focus has paid off for VoIP Supply, and Sayers said that the company has grown its bottom-line profit despite a flat top-line revenue since ditching video. It has gone from 10,000 products to about 3,500, and now has time and resources to take its business forward.

In fact, it has already hired a new sales director, and is looking to expand its cloud-based hosted PBX services, dubbed CloudSpan.

The three-year-old video conferencing division seemed like a sensible ancillary to the company’s bread-and-butter business of selling hardware to support IP communications, including headsets, phones, accessories, PBXs, gateways and more. But after launching in 2012, the company was unable to hit its $30 million revenue target by the end of last year, instead coming in around $20 million. That represents about 5.5 percent of the company’s 2014 revenue—not enough to justify the amount of time that the sales and marketing staff were spending on it.

Sayers characterized the video foray as a valuable learning experience, but said that he recognized that it would take more resources to grow it. The staff was spending as much time on the video-conferencing equipment as it did on the big moneymaker, VoIP---and they were stretched too thin. Adding insult to injury was the fact that it was trying to sell security services as well—another line of business that has since been discontinued.

So, “we became more focused on who we are,” he told the Buffalo Business Journal. “It didn’t make sense to be spending so much time on video conferencing. We’re VoIP Supply, not video conferencing supply or security supply. It hurt our revenue a little bit, but we became focused on one set of technologies, not three complementary ones.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle