O-Tel Telecom announces acquisition of Rheid's communication division

O-Tel Telecom today announced the acquisition of Rheid Telecom, a leading provider of VOIP telephony in South Africa, for an undisclosed sum.

Rheid Communication provides white-labelled VOIP infrastructure to resellers, who in turn deploy to the public countrywide. With the addition of Rheid's client base, O-Tel Telecoms' nationwide Telephone 2.0 network will reaffirm its intention to be the largest white label infrastructure service provider in SA.

“Commercial VOIP is the fastest growing technology in the telecommunications sector,” said Mohammad Patel, CEO at O-Tel Telecom.

“Acquisitions are needed in this environment to ensure leadership in the field. Part of our strategy is additional full acquisitions or partial stake shareholding of PBX distributors and LCR providers who have sizeable databases, as O-Tel aims to retain its market leadership in its 1Cloud Hosted PBX.”

O-Tel Telecom will deliver to Rheid clients advanced VOIP services, such as voice backhaul via O-Tel's national private network, wireless access to its switches, geographic telephone numbers, lower call rates, automated billing services, and 1Cloud Hosted PBX.

Wendy Taylor, director at Rheid Communications, explains: “Rheid Communications is an amalgamation of design, marketing and IT-based services, which include Web hosting, Web design and VOIP. We need to focus on our core business, which is design and Web-based services. Therefore, our strategy moving forward no longer includes providing VOIP. To be effective for our customers, we have decided to streamline our business.”

With this acquisition, Rheid Communication becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of O-Tel Telecom, and will be moving its entire switch infrastructure into O-Tel's Data Centre.

“As the market begins to adopt VOIP and 1Cloud's Hosted PBX as their mainstream in telephony, the timing of this move could not have been better.” adds Patel.

Rheid director, Stephen Smit, feels a renewed energy will benefit its clientele.

“While the business relationship with our clients will continue during the six months transition phase, we look forward to extending our clients reach into a vast array of additional services where profitability can increase.”

O-Tel's number portability and geographic number allocation drive has been a key factor in Rheid's decision.

Smit concludes: “A very big thank you to all our clients for their support over the years. We feel this deal with O-Tel is a positive move as O-Tel will be in a position to offer improved services and support to our customers. We have dealt with O-Tel for a few years and know they can offer excellent and professional service.”

The official move date has been set for 25 March 2011.