While it was not Sally Stothard's intention to rise through the ranks when she joined Armstrong in 1998, she now plays a leading role in the company and was a central figure in last month's management buyout.

Stothard's credentials are impeccable. She joined Armstrong in 1998 and during her time at the company has gained valuable insight into all areas of the business having worked in accounts, engineering and sales. After managing the engineering arm of the firm Stothard has now moved to the role of Managing Director.

Established in 1995 by Steve Donovan and Bob Cory, Armstrong Communications underwent a management buyout spearheaded by Stothard in February, that saw the MBO team acquire Cory's 50 per cent shareholding. This facilitated a change from an owner managed to a team managed business, and gave the people working in the business a greater share of its success. "We are of the firm opinion that shareholders need to be operational and should be adding value to the business on a daily basis," said Stothard. "We now have a strong management team in place focused on a growth plan which will take the company to the next level in terms of size and capability."

In 1996 Donovan decided Inter-Tel would be ideal for developing computer telephony, its open architect interface allowing Armstrong to write software to enhance the base product and provide customers with bespoke applications. Software development became a business in its own right and was spun out into a separate company called Xarios. This is now an independent business and supplier of telephony software applications to other resellers, and the MBO resulted in Donovan being able to move to Xarios full time as its Managing Director.

The cash deal sees Paul Tobin take an equity stake in Armstrong. He has a track record of growing businesses in the IT sector, initially as Managing Director of CSAR Computers, followed by JM Computing (now trading as jmc.it). Tobin developed JM from a niche market supplier into a rated IT company. Stothard commented: "Our intention is to significantly increase the size of the business through acquisition and organic growth. Paul will provide considerable expertise in these areas which will enable me to focus on customer service."

Now entering a new era, Manchester-based Armstrong employs 23 staff and boasted a turnover for financial year end August 2009 of £2 million. Its target market is contact centres, where it can demonstrate a clear return on investment from staff productivity, and potentially realise its big ambition to be Mitel's top contact centre reseller in the UK. "This is based on our previous experiences with contact centres. We can provide outstanding support to anybody who measures response times in terms of minutes, not hours or days," added Stothard. "Armstrong has always been clear on the fact that we are exclusive suppliers of Mitel."
Armstrong is currently going through VMWare accreditation, believing that supplying tin will become a thing of the past. "Most enterprises are now considering virtualisation even if they don't implement it yet, and Mitel's MiCD solution will be a big part of our future," said Stothard. "We focus on the Mitel 5000 when fitted with Callview, now called Customer Service Manager, and Xarios Phone Manager for CRM integration, while at the high end Mitel 3300 fitted with Syntellect CIM. In both cases we supply Xarios Call Recorder with speech analytics. The key issue is delivery. With an exclusive Mitel strategy we can focus on technical excellence and actually make the technology do what the customer expects of it."

Armstrong's inherent skill in CTI and its knowledge of the contact centre industry puts it in a position to become the natural selection for Mitel contact centre customers, believes Stothard. "As virtualisation continues to grow as a key business requirement we intend to be first out of the blocks with a solution and the enterprise to deliver," said Stothard. "Our focus on one product set and our technical ability with Microsoft and Cisco gives us a first class understanding of contact centres."

PCi compliance is Armstrong's hot new product, which enables the recording of calls to be stopped and started, avoiding the recording of the cvv number. "This is a hot topic at the moment in any company taking payments by credit card over the phone," noted Stothard.

Before joining Armstrong Stothard's career began in operations working for a Ferranti GTE dealership in 1985. She then moved to an Avaya dealer where she sold SDX and Index systems. Not surprisingly, her deep understanding of the communications market has placed her firmly in the convergence camp. "It is crucial to own the customer end to end including local and wide area networks," Stothard said. "Voice is technically just another application along with video, mail etc, that all use this common delivery method. Our future depends on our ability to evolve into a combined voice and data supplier."