Renowned for his ability to spot opportunities for communication enablement and for astute investment in up and coming IT ventures, Angus MacRobert has concluded another great match between two of the most influential telephone management service providers in southern Africa. 
Unison Communications and Aspivia have just announced their plans to join forces and assume a united front in the market. This follows on from negotiations spearheaded by Aspivia director, MacRobert.
The relationship is one of natural progression. Unison and Aspivia have both been power players in the TMS (telephone management systems) market for years.
Between them they support two highly complementary product suites and excellent cloud and managed services offerings. These are underscored by an impressive 50 years of combined expertise in what has been a tumultuous ICT market.
Individually, each business supports not only a substantial, but extremely loyal customer base comprising most of South Africa’s Top 500 Companies and a significant portion of the public sector. Together, these create a power base that accounts for as solid 50% of TMS consumption in southern Africa.
The transaction goes far beyond leveraging IP, assets and customer lists. It also puts industry stalwarts Andrew Harris and Craig Young under the same roof, which in itself will be a formidable force to be reckoned with.
As Aspivia’s CEO and Unison’s chief operating officer respectively they won’t be facing off against one another to win top accounts, but Instead will be throwing the weight of their combined experience and insight behind a unified cause.
“We are really excited about the opportunities this relationship presents” says Harris.
“There is a lot of great synergy between Unison and Aspivia and huge respect between myself and Craig. We are looking forward to making things happen and believe that with the kind of offering we have, it’s going to be our customers who are going to come out tops.”
Young is in full agreement. “It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and we are finally collaborating on something we can be passionate about. The technology is there; we have the top people in the industry on board; we have everything we need to create the ideal platform.
“While we know that this is just the beginning of long road ahead, we expect that this is the first step towards emerging as the market leader for the whole of Africa.”