MTU certainly not letting grass grow under their feet.IT...

MTU certainly not letting grass grow under their feet.


IT Business M2 Telecommunications seeks acquisitions by: Stuart Kennedy From: The Australian October 28, 2011 12:00AM
Vaughan Bowen is managing director of telecommunications group M2 Source: Australian IT
Junior telco M2 Telecommunications will push into further acquisitions, cloud computing services and may become an NBN aggregator as the CEO baton passes from Vaughan Bowen to Geoff Horth.
Mr Bowen has stepped back from the CEO slot to concentrate on acquisitions and supplier relationships and remains an executive director at the company he co-founded and led from start-up in 1999 to a 500 staff plus concern today.

M2 has pulled off a dozen acquisitions in the last four years but hasn’t done one for six months while it bedded down its recent buy of Clear Communications and worked through the transition of Mr Horth moving from the COO slot to becoming CEO.

‘We’ve spent the last six months making sure the business has the right foundations for its next wave of growth, both organic and through acquisitions,’ said Mr Bowen.

From here M2 will look for bolt-on style acquisitions that boost customer numbers and market share as well as higher risk strategic buys that put the company into fresh business streams.


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"Going into the cloud space with hosted solutions is the next evolution – a good example for us would be hosted phone system solutions where you move away from having a box on the wall to a hosted environment and a pay per seat model.

"That would be very complementary to our business, especially the Commander business which has a heritage in phone systems."

Mr Bowen said M2 would focus on services that businesses already use rather than trying to create demand with entirely new services.

"Build it and they will come in a bit dangerous when you are a challenger player,’ he said.

Possible upcoming hosted products included video conferencing and unified messaging.

"Storage is also in the mix as a short term product extension. Going into software as a service is probably a bridge too far at this point although it’s not something we would rule out," he said.

M2’s field force could potentially be used as a sales channel for future cloud service offerings.

Reselling SaaS products was the most likely way M2 would get into cloud software.

"We could be a distribution vehicle for an accounting software provider to get its hosted solutions into small businesses," said Mr Bowen.

M2 would push into cloud services by either by acquisitions, internal growth or both, Mr Bowen.

Meanwhile, M2 has been trialling reselling NBN connections to business for Telstra Wholesale. So far it only has a handful of NBN customers and has entered the evaluation phase of the trial.

"We are interested to know what Telstra and others can provide us not just in terms of base access to the network but also over the top of the network services," said Mr Bowen.

"If NBN is the electricity, what are the appliances you can plug in?"

M2 is particularly interested in how soft switched telephony services over the NBN will be implemented for resellers. "Voice is still the killer application for small businesses," said Mr Bowen.

There is a strong possibility that M2 could move into becoming an NBN aggregator itself and wholesale NBN services to downstream providers.

"It’s a very real possibility – we need to understand what the cost mechanics look like on that in terms of the interconnection to the 121 points of presence that the NBN is building and the cost of the infrastructure needed in being able to aggregate and we have had conversations with NBN specifically on that front."

Mr Bowen said that even without further acquisitions M2 was placed to grow from having about 4 percent of the small business telco market to 10 percent of the market within three to five years.