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 CEO Steve Bederman Leaves Call Center Solutions Provider TouchStar to Build New BusinessOctober 28, 2008
 By Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director
Denver, Colorado-based call center solutions provider TouchStar has announced its CEO Steve Bederman (News - Alert) is stepping down to pursue opportunities at a UK startup.
Bederman engineered TouchStar’s (News - Alert) growth from a tiny two-person startup ten years ago itself, to a globally recognized call center and unified communications technology provider that now boasts a customer base of close to 3,000 businesses.
When Bederman first started with TouchStar back in 1998, its focus was the small call center market in the United States, from which it soon moved also into the mid-size call center market seven years ago, and during the past three years, it has been providing its vast array of products to the large call center space as well.
Certainly, that growth has not been completely organic, as TouchStar has acquired several competitors over the years, which Bederman says have provided TouchStar the expertise to grow into the global power it has become.
Indeed, TouchStar made a bold move entering the enterprise market earlier this year with its TouchStar Enterprise 2008, a full-featured enterprise unified communications and virtualization solution for outbound, inbound and blended communications.
TouchStar recognized what many in the communications space have come to understand in the part year — the world is not made up of enterprise businesses. Instead, it is made up of small and mid-sized businesses as its foundation. TouchStar maintains it has no intention of shying away from its traditional customer base, but says its phone systems are robust enough to provide everything enterprises need from a unified voice and data management combination.
So why wouldn’t we sell to that market too, Bederman asked.
“We have some of the top expertise in development and design in the world — through our own business and through acquisition — in what we do,” said Bederman. “We combined this mindshare, and the outcome of that was our enterprise product.”
In addition, Bederman explained that, despite being predominantly a Dialogic (News - Alert) platform, TouchStar was also looking to add technology from NMS to its solutions, in order to be able to provide more options on the telephony side. In fact, Bederman has always touted TouchStar’s responsibility to offer choice to its customers, even through its role as an industry consolidator.
“As we bought companies, I recognized we reduced competition, and reduced the opportunity for selection by the customer,” he explained. “I’ve always felt that we have to be responsible and ensure options for clients, and that’s what drives our business.”
To that end, TouchStar has taken many of its acquired products and technologies and moved them into niche markets, where they have served its customers well. But, at some point, even rapidly growing businesses bear the burden of fiscal responsibility, which resulted a 20 percent cut in staff — which consequently resulted in rumors that TouchStar might be in trouble.
Bederman insists this is not the case.
“I am proud of what we accomplished and I am confident that TouchStar has a very bright future,” he said. “Our entire management team worked hard this year to finely tune TouchStar’s operating model for long term success as a mature business. Our work paid off because we made adjustments early in the year that put us ahead of the macro market challenges.”
According to Bederman, TouchStar is enjoying record revenues this year — largely driven by its enterprise product — but the company’s growth has created a natural struggle to ensure the organization grows at the same pace. In order to ensure that consistency of growth, TouchStar set about to change its operational infrastructure to streamline its processes in order to be able to fulfill its promises to its customers.
Whether that change movement, which also included a degree of management change, prompted Bederman to seek a new opportunity is unclear, but he has always thrived on driving growth. He helped turn TouchStar into a multimillion dollar business – he told TMCnet he expected some $31 million in revenues this year — and one that, with its newly streamlined operations and growing customer base is well positioned to move on independently.
So, it is hardly surprising that Bederman, who says has always “been intrigued by growth,” has decided to move on to a new opportunity, where the greatest challenge he faces is living up to the expectations his success with TouchStar have set.
“As I became confident in TouchStar’s ability to operate successfully for the long term, I started to consider the next opportunity to do what really inspires me,” he said.
He will, however, remain with TouchStar in an advisory role, which he believes will benefit both companies, given the synergies between the two. He has not named his new company.
For more on TouchStar and the technologies Bederman helped build, please visit the Dialer and Hosted Call Center channels on TMCnet. Erik Linask (News - Alert) is Group Managing Editor of TMCnet, which brings news and compelling feature articles, podcasts, and videos to nearly 3,000,000 visitors each month. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Erik Linask ResourcesVisit our call center industry resource library and learn how to optimize your contact center for maximum profitability. Find these resources and more at incontact.com LEARN MORE
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