Public Funding for BTS Holdings Limited

Corporate telephony (CT) is an essential means for communicating and directing calls and messages within organisations using an internal numbering scheme. CT can be delivered on legacy systems (older phone systems using telephone lines with a primary rate interface) as well as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The market is dominated by large enterprises e.g. Unify, Avaya, Cisco in a multi-billion pound sector which is steadily growing at 2.2% p.a. There have been noticeable recent market trends: * heavy discounting, particularly for global telephony deals, with vendors offering bundling of telephony functions into a single licence * unified communications (UC) These are adversely impacting our SME telephony business and we need to respond. Current CT uses a monolithic platform with a centralised server providing a range of services, on a highly complex basis, with implications for costs which are passed on to users. We have identified a gap in the market for a simpler, highly innovative, more resilient CT, for which the project name is TOAD. TOAD is expected to drive down the costs of CT by 50%. We expect TOAD to open new and wider market opportunities for BTS.