Evolve IP Gets Big Investment to Drive Growth, Expansion

Evolve IP this week announced it will receive a majority investment from Great Hill Partners, a midmarket, growth-oriented private equity firm.

Evolve IP said it will use the capital to accelerate its growth plans, including increasing its product offerings, growing its geographic footprint and adding staff. It also will use the investment to expand and enhance its national distribution channels, including VARs, direct market resellers and master channel partners.

Evolve IP works with more than 20 master agents, direct market resellers and VARs that represent about 6,500 sales partners.

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Tim Allen, Evolve IP’s chief sales and marketing officer, and founding partner, tells Channel Partners the investment means numerous benefits for existing partners.

“No. 1, more incentives to sell Evolve IP. Evolve IP will be adding sales incentives on new sold revenue and increasing participation in the annual programs that our master agencies and DMRs/VARs create to educate and support their sales partners,” he said. “No. 2, more sales and sales engineering resources. Evolve IP has already begun adding additional sales and sales engineering resources in key geographies to support our partners in the sales process and in their program execution. No.3, more Evolve IP exposure in key events. Evolve IP will participate in more industry and channel-related events.”{ad}

Also, Evolve IP will accelerate the development of new and enhanced product offerings, Allen said.

“Since Evolve IP is a major provider of both UCaaS/contact center and cloud computing services, we offer our partners the opportunity to double the revenues coming from each customer,” he said. “Last year alone, our partners grew their Evolve IP customer bases by 42 percent on average simply by adding UCaaS/contact center services to cloud computing customers and cloud computing services to their UCaaS/contact center customers.”

Evolve IP’s services currently are deployed on four continents and in 15 countries, to more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with more than 100,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points. The company migrates organizations to the cloud – freeing up IT …

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… resources, eliminating capital expenditures and lowering total cost of ownership.

“Evolve IP’s partners are adopting the monthly recurring revenue model of the cloud faster than ever,” Allen said. “We will be investing in human resources to facilitate the sale of cloud services to their prospects and customers; investing in programs that help them educate their sales partners in how to identify and close opportunities; and increasing our business development efforts to ensure that Evolve IP has increasing mindshare with those partners that see the cloud as a major part of their future growth. Additionally, we will be providing value-added marketing services to our more progressive partners in the areas of lead-generation, opportunity development, as well as Web and product content through our innovative IPartners program.”

Great Hill Partners provides private equity to finance the expansion, recapitalization or acquisition of growth companies in a wide range of sectors, including software, financial and health care technology, digital media, eCommerce and Internet infrastructure.

“Just a decade ago, ‘the cloud’ was a nascent industry, but it has now grown to become one of the fastest growing technology sectors,” said Christopher Gaffney, Great Hill Partners’ co-founder and managing partner. “Organizations around the world are making the transition to the cloud at an ever increasing rate, and the support and services provided by Evolve IP make it a clear leader in the space.”