For Subscribers

Get the complete article now!

TWST: Can we begin with a brief historical sketch of Eckoh Technologies (London:ECK.L), bringing us up to date with exactly how the company is positioned today?

Mr. Turner: Eckoh Technologies floated on the London market in late 1999. It was formerly called 365 Corporation and investor interest at flotation was the internet content activities. About a year ago the Board of Directors made a decision to examine the strategy of the company. As a result of that review significant changes were made which resulted in the company moving its focus onto its voice technology assets which it had acquired prior to flotation through the acquisition of a company called Symphony Telecom. In fact, both pre- and post-flotation, over 90% of 365’s revenues were in the voice area.

TWST: Who is the customer?

Mr. Turner: Large corporates, particularly in the call center arena. To date we’ve signed up Virgin Mobile, Centrica, a big utility company, and we recently announced a deal with British Telecom to be their exclusive provider of these hosted services to their customers. We feel this deal is a transforming deal for the company and one that is going to make a huge difference to us moving forward. It gives us access to BT’s entire customer base and we’re going to work with them to fully exploit this technology and really get the best out of it. The target market is very much call center based and that’s certainly an area where BT is extremely strong, and we certainly hope that this partnership is going to exploit the big opportunities we see there.

TWST: When will the BT partnership be up and running?

Mr. Turner: Well, we announced the partnership about three weeks ago. What’s basically going to happen is we’re actually going to build speech capability into their network and it’s going to take around four months to complete that build. BT’s paying for all of that and we’re also going to be supplying them with access to quite a number of our technical people here to run the services. But that delay won’t stop us from talking to customers before then, and there has been a good, favorable response to this already.

TWST: And what’s the duration of the contract?

Mr. Turner: It’s a two year contract. It’s very exciting and we think that it really validates a lot of what we’ve been working on over the past twelve months.

TWST: Geographically, is it UK focused at the moment or do you have access to mainland Europe markets?

Mr. Turner: The BT deal is UK-centric. Having said that, one of the reasons we wanted to integrate the speech operating platform into BT’s network is to allow us to bring calls in from Europe, and BT obviously has a huge network not just in the UK but abroad. So we can backhaul calls from Europe to the UK quite inexpensively, so it’s great for those international companies that want to provide speech-driven services (multilingual services are not a problem for us) across Europe.

TWST: What’s a quick synopsis of the game plan going forward, perhaps over the next 12 to 24 months?

Mr. Turner: Last quarter we put out our first operating profit as a group, which was a big milestone for the company. This time last year the company was losing a lot of money and I think people were right to ask questions about whether we could turn the company around. But with the new focus on Speech Solutions, we’ve moved the company from a huge loss situation -- this time last year we were losing in the order of £4 or £5 million a quarter -- to showing a first profit this quarter.