Five key recruits at new Vapour HQ

Cloud technology specialist Vapour has welcomed five new faces into the team as the straight-talking firm pursues its ambitious £7m growth targets.

Bolstering the sales team is business development manager Dan Needham, who joins the business from Manchester-based Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS). With a strong enterprise background – particularly in the SaaS environment – his area of expertise is the more unusual technical sell, with a key focus on people-led digital transformation projects.

He’s joined by fellow business development manager Mark Taylor – a technology agnostic salesperson who comes from a more varied sales background, as Vapour pursues its mission to boost the efficiencies, scalability and security of UK organisations.

Sales support coordinator Becky Pritchard completes the new line up of faces added to the commercial team. Having previously worked for Next Generation Security, and Safe & Secure IT Solutions, she has a strong account management skill-set.

The growing complexity of Vapour’s cloud toolkit – enhanced in recent months with the development of a dedicated SD-WAN proposition for hybrid working, to name just one new solution – has seen the company appoint David Parsons as solutions engineer. A talented cloud specialist with 13 years’ experience working for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), David bridges the gap between Vapour’s sales and engineering teams, and has fast become the ‘go to’ voice for ultra-technical projects – particularly for clients completely rethinking their cloud-first networks of the future.

The fifth addition to the business is cloud UC engineer Ronnie Paton – a former military serviceman who developed a career in the telecoms space upon resettlement into civilian life. He supports the presales team with their growing workload, as well as helping to look after Vapour’s cloud communications solution.

The hires coincide with Vapour’s relocation to Heritage Exchange – a converted textiles mill on the outskirts of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The extensively refurbished space was purposefully designed to give the growing team a fresh and more collaborative workplace on their return from extended periods of working from home.

Commenting on the hires, Vapour’s head of transformation and operations Carol McGrotty, said: “We’ve been extremely open about our plans to expand to become a £7m business by the end of our 2021 financial year, and people will prove crucial to this. We’re as known for our team as we are our toolkit, so these five hires have been made at pace, but with extreme precision.”

CEO Tim Mercer added: “Now everyone is talking about cloud-first infrastructures, we’re a safe pair of hands, making the complex simple, clever and powerful. We’ve worked hard to hand-select talented individuals who care as much about busting jargon as our existing committed team.

“And things seem to be paying off. We recorded as much monthly recurring revenue in Q1 of 2021, as we did in the first half of 2020, and it’s double the amount we achieved in the second half of last year. I don’t think that’s bad, given economic turbulence caused by the pandemic.

“There are three product launches on the horizon too, so we need to be ready for the next chapter of growth.”