Founded in 2007, and active in 15 European countries with a partner network across Europe, NFON is going places. Determined to grow, NFON means business, with a relish for bringing partners and customers along on the journey, doing things properly by garnering relationships and providing the support and investment required, always with a keen eye on the future.
Patrik Heider was appointed CEO at NFON AG in May 2023, succeeding Dr. Klaus von Rottkay, who had held the post for three years. With a change in upper management came fresh thoughts and fresh faces, all with a determined purpose: to continuously and sustainably develop NFON AG profitability with a view to the future. By July 2023 the vision had been set, with Heider commenting “Earnings must grow more strongly than revenue, with revenue growth at least equalling market growth. In order to be able to fully exploit the potential in the future and to live up to the role as an innovative pioneer of integrated cloud business communications in the European market, operational excellence is the essential basis.” Within 18 months Heider would be delivering on his vision.
Recognising home-grown talent, Markus Krammer was appointed Chief Product Officer in July 2023, and ex Cisco Systems GmbH Merano Mettbach was recruited to the Chief Sales Officer role in September 2023, before filling the Chief Revenue Officer role from June 2024. Excellent talent acquisitions have been made in two ex-SAP staff, namely Andreas Wesselmann, Chief Technical Officer, appointed in January 2024 and Jana Richter, Executive Vice President AI and Innovation, joining in October 2024. Stability in the UK market is provided by Myles Leach, who has over 25 years of experience in the Telecoms Industry, including 8 years as Managing Director of NFON UK.
NFON Heritage
Refreshingly, with the management changes, was a desire to acknowledge and care for the 55,000-strong customer base. NFON worldwide has garnered, and cared for, a multitude of small, medium and some large enterprises, providing cloud-based business communication services, with services ranging from cloud telephony, contact centers and unified communications. To this day, there is an account manager assigned to each customer, no matter how big or small they might be, to ensure relationships are stable and long lasting.
NFON’s cloud telephony system, Cloudya, allows users to scale up and down based on their business needs. Cloudya’s easy set up and fast configuration enables users to work anywhere from any device, perfect for businesses of any size. NFON offers UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) solutions, including NFON Contact Center Hub, with a 99.9% system uptime in fully georedundant architecture. The beauty of NFON is that it offers flexible pricing models with predictable monthly charges. The acquisition of AI specialist botario in August 2024, a company that supports and automates interactions in both text and voice input, provided a springboard for NFON’s existing, and future, product portfolio and services, to be re-energised and re-engineered.
NFON Strategy
With a new, yet highly experienced, team on board, coupled with onboarding botario, Heider announced the NFON NEXT 2027 strategy in January 2025, which includes all employees, partners and customers. Heider is keen to emphasize the “We rethink business communication” part of the overall strategy, indicating that new technologies, strategies and approaches to business practices are afoot. Acquiring botario was indeed a smart decision, and here’s why – botartio offers on-prem LLM (large language models), enables omni-channel approaches and has excellent GDPR compliance. There is a technical complexity of deploying and managing LLMs on private infrastructure, however they provide a significant advantage in terms of data security, privacy and performance.
There is a strong emphasis on AI in the strategy, with NFON aiming for a leadership role in AI-based business communications. Big ambitions indeed. There is no doubt that AI will enable NFON to understand customer needs more precisely and make processes more efficient. Andreas Wesselmann re-iterated at the time, “Our mission is to lead companies into the future with intelligent technology and to grow together.” It’s the words “grow together” that is most important here, and NFON has a job to do in getting its broad customer base of small, medium and large enterprises on the AI-readiness journey. NFON is actively looking for new partners that can take advantage of the AI opportunity, particularly MSPs.
NFON’s Scalable and AI-supported solutions
The current NFON NEXT 2027 strategy is certainly heavily weighted on AI and the new opportunities it represents. In an interview in February 2025, with Jana Richter, she acknowledged that when the decision was made to restructure the organisation, it was to include “not just AI engineering” but also product management and UX design to foster innovation in intelligent experiences. In January, Richter stated, “The more precisely we understand our customers’ requirements, the better we can further develop our solutions, and thereby make a real difference as a provider of AI-based business communications. The key points for companies that deploy our solutions are improvements in customer experience, efficiency and productivity enhancements, and stronger and smarter decision-making processes.”
Currently Richter has approximately 60 NFON employees engaged in various AI projects within the sustainable innovation cycle: from initial idea and concept through to data science and engineering as well as implementation and practical applications. Having such an inclusive culture means that the innovation loop is rich with perspectives from web clients, mobile clients, the admin portal and also technical consulting and professional services.
The gift of Richter’s previous experience from a big organisation, is being embraced into a mid-size company setting where agility and enablement comes to the forefront, and as she puts it, “We can have a direct influence on what we do and where we’re going. So that’s a very exciting journey, right? It really has a direct impact on what we execute.”
NFON Delivery
And the NFON innovation is being delivered, at pace. With Wesselmann and Richter’s heritage of Deep Learning, LLM’s, Cloud, Data and AI, embedding processes and enhancing capabilities of core products seems to come naturally. Within months NFON Intelligent Assistant emerged, enabling partners and customers to connect with NFON using integrated modern methodology and technology.
The first releases, under the strategic pillar of Business Telephony, is a global website chatbot and voicemail transcription. The AI-based chatbot Nia has been introduced on the NFON website. NFON’s intelligence assistant is available to provide visitors with rapid and precise information and immediate help with queries, 24/7. “Nia is a knowledgeable assistant that not only provides answers quickly, it also gives users the confidence that their questions will be answered competently and efficiently,” notes Richter. NFON’s voicemail transcription is set for general availability at the end of March 2025. This new function enables companies to transcribe voicemails quickly and accurately without having to listen to an entire audio recording. The transcripts are delivered via e-mail, making it easy to manage and record information. The function will be available in the web and desktop apps as well as in the mobile app.
Both AI-integrated launches represent the first steps of many, in a series of planned AI integrations, into NFON’s cloud telephony. Future innovations include AI-based statistics, automated analysis of e-mail attachments and smart routing for more efficient customer communication.
NFON Relationships
When Heider and his team put the NFON NEXT 2027 strategy together, there was, and is, a strong recognition that every action taken, in terms of achieving operational excellence, is for the benefit of NFON customers and NFON partners’ customers. NFON wants to ensure they come along “satisfied” and for the long-term, and hence the strategy of “dual transformation” operations comes into play. NFON already have satisfied customers, with the highest GDPR compliance in Europe, and extended product offerings through agile and scalable computer telephony integrations. With extended AI into offerings and integrations, NFON want to enable partners, and customers, automated contact center tasks and enhanced agent performance, at a pace that suits, but with incentives and in unison.
NFON NGAGE and NEXUS
Putting the NEXT into NFON NEXT 2027, partners are certainly wanting to know what’s next for them. NFON are determined to provide first-class professional support, and will be rolling out a NEXUS Partner Programme in July, which will unite all existing channel programmes within a central hub, that NFON currently runs for resellers, service providers, wholesalers and white-label partners. NEXUS starts with new partners directly and will be rolled out to all other existing partnerships, step by step, at a pace that suits them. The current NGAGE partner programme stays active until all existing partners are migrated.
Not too Big, Not too Small, Doing Something Right
NFON results recently have been buoyant, with company reports clearly stronger profitability: adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose significantly by 48% year-on-year. Total revenue is up by 6.1% and there is a marked increase in free cash flow. Good news for now, and with the partner programme ramped up in the summer, with extensive focus on customer engagement, one expects to see even bigger results.
One could say, at this moment, that the strategy, the management team, the product programme, and the results, are just right.
