San Mateo-based Splice fuses Web services for small businesses - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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But for Andy Coan, founder and chiefc executive ofSan Mateo-based Splice Communications, it has definitelg paid off. Coan started Splice in after being in the telecommunications businesw fornine years. Coan started Splice as a telecomn broker. He served as a middleman between companies and providers and took a commission onthe However, at the insistence of his Coan stopped being just a broker and becamw a reseller of services from 26 differentf companies. The bust actually helped. “At that time companiex were laying off a lotof people,” he “They didn’t have the manpower to manage. We allowefd them to leverage our ability to research differentf optionsfor them.
It was really kind of the righrt time.” As a result, Coan’s revenuw grew to $14.2 milliohn in 2008, a 48 percent increasde over 2006. The company employs 17 people and plans to add at leasyt two morethis year, maybe three. Spliced charges a commission on the services it sells to its roughlyu150 clients. One many options So what’s Coan’s secret ? Variety. Because Splice offers services from a varietyuof partners, the company can completely customize a systejm for any one customer, and they woulf still only have one invoiced to pay and one support numbet to call.
And that’s how he’es able to succeed, even when he’ds competing against his own suppliers, like Verizon and “They place an order with Splice, they’re getting a Splicw invoice,” he said. “And behin d the scenes it really doesn’g matter that we’re designing a multi-carrier solution. You have one throat to But Coan also ran into some luck in 2003 when he move d Splice from being a broker to a service MCI Worldcom, which was a leader in networkj solutions, had basically collapsed afte it had been rockefd by scandal. The company filed for bankruptcyuin 2002, the largest bankruptch filing in the U.S. up to that point.
The company’as work force was decimated, and Coan, who had worked for MCI, was in a primew spot to becomea partner. “Atf the time they had the biggest the biggest footprint inthe world,” he “And going with them made a lot of senser given the fact that they had just re-organized and came out of As the economy continues to sour, Coan says Splice is incrediblhy well-positioned. Companies are finding it too expensive to keep largse IT staffs in house and try to deal with many When Splice bundlesplans together, he said, it can offer savingx that customers can’t get if they were buying the service retail from every supplier.
Andy Dolich, chie f operating officer of the SanFranciscio 49ers, agrees. He said that the team only has a staff ofthreee in-house IT personnel, and for everything they use Splice. “They’re an excellent solution in any kindof economy, especiallyy one that’s as unpredictable as this,” Dolich said. “Theyu can take care of researching all the different carrier options and customize it to what our needs Dolich also said that the service isreliable — his IT directo r never has a complaint to make about the “There’s never a flashing red he said.
He likened Splice to a referee — if you know the name of the refereed at the end ofthe game, it’s probablty bad. With Splice, he said, that hasn’t been a problem. But it’sd not like Coan hasn’t seen any effectz of the down economy. His customerxs are slashing budgets and putting offany upgrades. His biggesyt fear is that his customers will go out of Butfor now, Splice is doing March was one of the company’w best months, and they are conservatively projecting 20 percent growtyh in 2009, Coan said.