Excalibur wins Vodafone Regional Partner of the Year award
Dealer builds on Sunday Times success and revenue growth
Dealers - Jasper Hart
November 4, 2020
The dealer has also been named Vodafone Innovation Partner of the Year
Olive Communications CEO Martin Flick has been named as one of the top-50 most ambitious business leaders of 2020 by LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.
The nomination recognises business leaders across the UK, with LDC committed to spending more than £1.2 billion in the next three years to support the ambitions of management teams leading mid-market firms.
Speaking to Mobile News, Flick said the nomination showcases Olive as a “market- leading” business.
“It’s a great honour, but it’s not a solo performance because we’re ambitious as a team,” he said.
Talking of the company’s development, he added: “We’ve gone from being a mobile business to more communications, and now an overall technology business.”
New contracts
Despite the lockdown, Olive has struck four contracts during the period, including two with businesses that were fully carried out virtually and worth multimillion pounds.
“We engaged virtually over video to understand their requirements, did their needs analysis and put a proposal forward,” said Flick. “We delivered the service without ever sending an engineer to site or going to their premises.”
The move to more remote working has also been welcomed by Flick and Olive, who specialise in offering cloud solutions, as well as IoT, 5G and SD-WAN services.
Flick did, however, say that a lack of travel has affected some of its roaming revenue – though cloud growth has offset this.
“We’ve got a big mobile base of around 100,000 customers and we’ve seen a massive drop in out-of-bundle international roaming spend,” he said.
“This has been difficult, but we’re fortunate because we’ve got strong cloud revenue. As we’re not mobile-only, it doesn’t hit us as bad as those that just do mobile. When things start to get back to normal, people are going to start travelling again.”
Vodafone recognition
Olive has also been awarded the ‘Innovation Partner of the Year’ by Vodafone, as part of the operator’s 2020 Partner Awards.
Commenting on the success Flick said: “Olive has evolved over the last five years to become a Cloud Communications Provider, but we retain a strong mobile heritage. Our longstanding, collaborative partnership with Vodafone has opened up a wealth of opportunity to push the boundaries of what is possible.
“The Olive team is immensely honoured at being awarded Innovation Partner. It is testament to years of strategic alignment with the vision of a global powerhouse such as Vodafone and we are excited at what’s to come.”
