Answering the Call
It’s not every day that a company goes to great lengths to accommodate its competitors. But in a sense, that’s what Plymouth-based Spanlink did late last year when it spun off its call-center software division into a new company, Calabrio.
The move was made not only to more efficiently build up a base of clients, but also to establish Calabrio—which employs 120 people—as an entity wholly separate from Spanlink, whose market is in the broader area of business communications networks, particularly those employing voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) telephony. In other words, Spanlink is providing services using a variety of communications software platforms; Calabrio, meanwhile, is focusing on developing its own products.
“The distribution approach for Calabrio is partner based, not direct distribution based,” says Calabrio CEO Paul Lidsky. “The logical partners to sell our software were also technically competitors of Spanlink. To get them engaged selling our software, we had to get some distance.”
The partner companies—which hail from worldwide locations—are able to work with Calabrio because the company distributes its software via an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) relationship with San Jose–based Cisco Systems and through reseller partnerships. That means that both Calabrio, its resellers, and Cisco stand to gain from sales and service of Calabrio’s products.
Calabrio’s software products are meant to make it easier for VOIP-based contact centers to create forecasts, generate work schedules, measure quality and efficiency, and streamline call-center procedures—in short, to create a better experience for customers. The company’s software is currently installed on more than 500,000 desktops, according to Lidsky, including those at locally based companies such as Jostens and Allianz Life.
Work toward the split from Spanlink began in February 2007. “We began to realize that we had a growing software business whose growth would accelerate if it was treated as a standalone business,” Lidsky says. A software business and a telecom services business that uses different platforms “are very different in terms of how you run them and how you staff for them. We decided we really had two separate businesses.”
Spanlink operated the two companies as divisions of Spanlink from February to November, using the time to recruit resale partners and take care of the back-office mechanics necessary to create the new company. “We’ve received a great deal of support from partners who want to sell our software now that we’re a separate company,” Lidsky says.
The company also has gotten support from investors. At the end of November, about a month after the split, Calabrio received $8 million in financing from two Minnesota venture capital firms, BlueStream Ventures and Split Rock Partners. “The investors saw that we already had a line of revenue, we had an established market, and we had customers,” Lidsky says.
Calabrio is using the funding for marketing its new brand and for product development over the next 18 months. It will also hire both channel account managers (who manage the company’s partners, not its customers) and support engineers to help partners sell Calabrio’s software. And it will build a technical assistance center
that takes phone calls from partners about the software. Lidsky said the company is likely to add features and modules to its existing products.
Spanlink has no investment in Calabrio, though the two companies do partner on projects. They also will remain in the same building, though Calabrio is moving to a different floor.
