RocketUK.com

Dolly became the first cloned sheep, JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was published and Tony Blair takes the reins as the first Labour prime minister for 18 years.

This was the year that ROCKETUK.COM was launched by Mike and Lynda Relf. It was a year of rapid growth with the Rocket Ansa-Call contact centre being opened and completing rollout of a call handling CTI system for Leeds Secretarial.

Also, it was proud to achieve an industry first with its virtual reception patching service. Managing Director of ROCKETUK.COM, Mike Relf explains, “At this time every other standard message service was simply taking messages and forwarding them on. We took it one stage further, of course we still took messages, but we were able to re-direct calls to ensure our clients would not miss an important business opportunity.”

The 1998 Data Protection Act came into force and the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast.

As the business continued to grow at pace, word was spreading across the UK about ROCKETUK.COM’s telephony and IT expertise and it was asked to complete its first IT network implementation by the Referendum Movement.

On 11th August the UK stood and watched the sky, as day became night during the solar eclipse.

A second industry first in only two years of trading! The highly successful Alchemy Store was opened by ROCKETUK.COM and became the first website in the UK to sell telephony equipment direct to the customer. “We knew that there was a market for cutting out the middle man and selling equipment direct, but no one could have predicted the huge number of orders that would be received once the site went live,” comments Relf.

* Alchemy was the original product from the company that everyone today recognises as Avaya.

Meanwhile ROCKETUK.COM opened its second office to meet the demand for its products and services in the north of England and Scotland.

Fear of a bug causing planes to fall out of the sky and IT systems around the world to collapse at the stroke of midnight failed to materialise as we entered the new millennium.

The demand for expansion resulted in ROCKETUK.COM opening two more offices in Leeds and Cambridge as well as moving its head-office and Rocket Ansa-Call contact centre to 3-5 Alexandra Terrace in Aldershot, Hampshire, where it resides today. “The move to our new head-office heralded the start of Rocket Ansa-Call’s 24/7 service, prompted by a major project for Columbus Insurance and TravelEX,” comments Relf. “Since 2000 we haven’t looked back and have been providing our Rocket Ansa-Call service around the clock ever since.”

9/11.

Following the unprecedented success of the Alchemy store website and its Rocket Telecom service, ROCKETUK.COM was awarded Avaya Gold Business Partner status and soon became an official Avaya field trial site.

During this time it was recognised as having the largest configuration size of any Avaya IP field trial sites in the world.

Manchester hosted the Commonwealth Games and throughout the summer the Queen celebrated 50 years on the thrown with her golden jubilee.

With offices in Aldershot, Scotland, Leeds and Cambridge ROCKETUK.COM opened another office, this time in the London Borough of Harrow. It also worked hard to achieve Microsoft Certification.

England wins the rugby world cup, after beating Australia 20 – 17 in the final seconds of the match.

After just six years Rocket Ansa-Call celebrated its 1,000 customer milestone. With the benefits of outsourcing some or all of a businesses the customer service operations becoming increasingly more apparent, the phone continued to ring. ROCKETUK.COM took this opportunity to invest further in its contact centre installing the customer interaction management solution Synthesys from Noetica. “Noetica were soon much more than a software supplier and we became a business partner and successful reseller for the entire Noetica product range,” adds Relf.

US President George W. Bush is elected for a second term, whilst former president Ronald Reagan dies. The Boxing Day tsunami in Asia sends a shockwave across the world.

Deloitte awarded ROCKETUK.COM as a winner in its FAST 50 (in London and the South East) that recognises the fastest growing technology businesses. The year was capped off with ROCKETUK.COM taking its place as one of Europe’s top 300 technology companies.

As well as winning industry accolades, ROCKETUK.COM decided to give something back to the community and became the main sponsor for the Ray Of Hope animal sanctuary in Aldershot.


The England cricket team wins the Ashes, Prince Charles marries Camilla, London Wins 2012 Olympic bid and a day later the capital is rocked by terrorist attacks on its transport network.

ROCKETUK.COM become proud official sponsors of the London-based Harlequins rugby club (www.quins.co.uk).

The World Cup sees England fail to set the football world alight; Microsoft unveils its long awaited new operating system ‘Windows Vista’ and Google buys the website YouTube for £890 million.

Still continuing to set the pace in the telecoms industry, ROCKETUK.COM launches its Business Call Guardian call plan. Today its is the only service in the UK that delivers low call costs whilst ensuring lines are protected from the risk of fire, flood, vandalism, building evacuation, human error, line faults, in-house PBX system failure or even terrorist attacks.

Relf comments, “We enter our 10th year of business with a team of 85 highly motivated employees and client portfolio that is the envy of the industry.”

ROCKETUK.COM Celebrates its 10th Anniversary.

“Ten years on at ROCKETUK.COM and we have the same enthusiasm and drive as we did right at the beginning. We look forward to watching your business grow with us as we look set to make the next ten years even more successful. Our mission statement remains the same as day one - To provide the highest level of customer service in the industry. Period,” Mike Relf, Managing Director, ROCKETUK.COM.