During an economic slowdown the resellers that fare best are those that focus on products and services producing immediate and tangible savings, without significant up front cost. The recession in the early nineties broke the inertia of many BT customers, PSTN rates tumbled and alternative carriers like ACC, Worldcom and MFS thrived. Similarly legislative, technological and environmental changes can alter buyer behaviours. For example terrorist threats, epidemics, fuel costs and ‘green’ concerns are currently causing resurgence in the home-worker market. At Griffin we are working with many partners on home-worker ADSL roll-outs which often turn into MPLS broadband opportunities once companies realise they need a more robust solution to accommodate VPN traffic and VOIP.
Driven by the need for faster transaction times and the withdrawal of certain BT products, over a million PSTN and ISDN lines in retail outlets across the UK need to be upgraded to broadband in the next few years. The problem is that this will often represent an increase in cost for many retailers because credit card transactions use little bandwidth and call charges on PSTN are lower than what they would pay for a broadband line.
Griffin’s most successful partners are building solutions that both address the express needs of the customer and then add value in ways that maybe they had not considered. For example how about constructing a home-worker package where the broadband line can be ring fenced for home or office use? This can save on the cost of installing another PSTN line and broadband. How about connecting the homeworker to the company’s PBX over SIP, eliminating the cost of calls between the office and the homeworker and allowing them to behave as an extension off the switch?
Similarly in retail, think of other uses for the broadband. Voice is an obvious one but how about EPOS and CCTV? Uptime is an important criterion for retail so how about offering routers with a SIM card back up? Or better still one IPstream broadband line and one LLU broadband line, load-balanced together in a fail-over configuration?
These solutions are not always as easy to put together as they might seem, which is great since if you can do it you differentiate yourselves from the competition. Sector knowledge is key so partner with an ISP that understands how to sell to them and has invested in developing solutions that you can white label.
Source: Comms Dealer September.
Andrew Dickinson
