As new technology is made practical and affordable (and/or as the regulatory environment allows) the telecom ecosystem adapts to deliver new products and services to customers or to leverage the technology on the back-end to lower costs, or both. This evolution serves as a catalyst for Agents themselves to evolve. If Agents are anything, they are adaptable; quick on their feet and nimble, they have consistently been able to adjust their business models over the years to embrace new carrier services and fully capitalize on the opportunities that change presents. Just in my 11 years in telecom I have seen the typical Agent business model change from selling discount LD, to a consultative sales approach focusing on advanced data solutions, and everything in between.
Recently, there has been a “perfect storm” of poor economic conditions, revolutionary changes in technology and unprecedented access to, and a voracious appetite for, bandwidth (which has become ubiquitous and incredibly cost effective) that has once again changed the game. This perfect storm has influenced consumer behavior significantly; today’s customer wants to outsource as much of their telecom related operations to someone else as much as is practical and affordable. Here are a few of the buying triggers for customers today:
· Due to the poor economy affecting their sales and revenue, businesses have been reducing costs across the board
· Access to capital has been limited; to preserve CapEx budget, customers want to shift their purchases to their operating expense budget as much as possible
· Their increased reliance on the Internet and software applications for commerce, communication and almost every other aspect of their operations has led businesses today to seek protection of their infrastructure from such threats as security breaches, downtime/disruption in service, disaster and even lost productivity
· Again feeling the pinch of the economy, businesses have needed to reduce their IT staff or create more productivity on core functions with the same amount of staff
Because of this, customers are making a fundamental change in their philosophy in favor of shifting the responsibility of many of the mundane, transactional tasks that they typically would handle in-house, to their service provider. Managed Services aren’t really a new concept, just like cloud computing isn’t new either. However, those are the buzzwords that the most recent incarnation of these familiar concepts are being called. “Cloud” services have been around a long time, and so has the concept of “managed services”; what is different this time around is that technology is finally catching up to the potential of the concept and the market has the need and desire to acquire these services. This has led to these buzzwords ripping through our industry like a viral internet meme rips through the inboxes of Generation Y. But this is not all hype.
This demand for managed services is met by Managed Service Providers . Wikipedia describes them as typically “an information technology (IT) services provider, who manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of services to their clients either proactively or as they (not the client) determine that the services are needed. Most MSPs bill a flat or near-fixed monthly fee, which benefits their clients by providing them with predictable IT support costs”. These are firms where businesses outsource a great many of their IT functions, like desktop support and repair.
The decision maker today is typically the same for both IT and telecom services and now these decision makers are increasingly looking to apply the same model to more of their tasks including their telecom services and even their phone systems. This makes the traditional IT MSP’s an attractive target for carriers to recruit as agents. While they don’t have experience in the telecom side, they are uniquely well positioned to add telecom to their portfolio as a value added service.
But conversely, there is a remarkable number of Agents that have begun repositioning their businesses as MSP’s. They are expanding their portfolios to include the management of things like routers, firewalls and hosted or hybrid PBX’s. They are starting to offer data storage, backup and recovery and some are even going as far as investing in data centers of their own to be able to provide colocation and data center services. There is a definite upside to the agents who have been faced with a confluence of factors of their own that have but their businesses at risk. Some of the benefits are:
· Increased revenue per customer even in the face of the price compression and increased competition the rest of the industry is seeing
· Higher margins on professional services
· Agents own this residual revenue stream which mitigates the risk of carrier consolidation and some carriers changing their position on the agent channel, leading to reduced commissions or even cut contracts (as we have seen over the past few years from quite a few carriers)
· Creates a stickier, more stable and less price sensitive customer
· Easy upsell to their existing base and opens the door to a new market segment to which they can later laterally market their telecom services
By becoming an MSP, Agents are creating great value for their customers and in their own business. The downside is only that it would take an investment of time and money to build the infrastructure to support the customers and the expertise to do it well. Well at least, that was the case. PAETEC has invested in growing our product portfolio for partners over the last year to include an entire suite of services to turn any Agent into an MSP. Agents can leverage our resources, our infrastructure and our expertise in order to meet the managed service needs of their customers. Products like our:
Managed Routers
· Managed firewall (both CPE based and from the Cloud)
· Cloud based Intrusion Detection and Prevention
· IP Simple phone system
· Data backup and recovery
· Dedicated Servers and web hosting
· Colocation and more
We have even rolled out our SBOSS software package, which agents are implementing to help them manage their new MSP business. Our commitment to the Agent Channel has made us focus on enabling our partners growth; which is why we have gone to great lengths to ensure that our Agent partners have the tools they need to be successful into the future. As their business evolves, so will ours in support.
CLICK HERE to learn how becoming an MSP could benefit you or to learn more about PAETEC’s turnkey services that enable our partners to become MSP’s with little to no investment.
No comments:
Post a Comment