Technology Reseller v07

01732 759725 IP TELEPHONY 24 Addressing more than 1,500 delegates at Microsoft’s ‘Future Decoded’ event at ExCeL, London at the start of November, Muller described cloud as “a better and fundamentally new way of doing things” and called on businesses to switch on to the transformational opportunities it presents. Daisy Group, the largest independent provider of IT, telecommunications and cloud services to UK businesses, is Microsoft’s biggest UK partner for the Azure platform. In a ‘Future Decoded’ Q&A with Microsoft Executive Vice President Julia White, Muller said that talking about cloud as another product was a mistake and that cloud is a whole new way of working that requires a different culture. “Our customers occupy all sectors – small and mid-market, public and private. They are traditional British businesses, not ‘born in the cloud’ businesses like UBER, NETFLIX or Airbnb, but they are far more engaged with technology development than you might think. We’ve just completed our annual digital survey and the number of small and medium-sized businesses with a digital strategy has doubled in the last year. Sixty per cent of them have a clear digital strategy, compared to 30% last year, with the majority outlining a ‘cloud-first’ approach. Like any significant change in a business, at its heart is the need for change. And this requires strong leadership from the very top.” He added that it also requires the support of partners that can help businesses manage their transition to the cloud. “I’m a big fan of cloud and what it can do for business, but I am not yet advocating the cloud as the answer to everything. It’s still about balance. That’s where organisations like Daisy come in – helping customers work out that balance between the traditional and cloud: bringing our decades of experience of traditional IT to our new experiences with Azure. And all wrapped in a next- generation managed service in order for businesses to get value from their data and for it to be protected and safe. It’s about finding the balance between having your head buried in the sand or all the way up in the clouds. Somewhere in the middle is right,” he said. www.daisygroup.com huge opportunities in convergence, it has added a hosted IP solution to its portfolio. Daisy realised that in order to become the supplier of choice in the reseller channel, HV.Select had to be more than just another ‘me-too’ product. So, from the start, it took the decision to make it the best hosted IP solution designed specifically for the channel. ‘To be the best’ is something of a mission statement at Daisy Group. What it means in the case of HV.Select is to have the best feature set, at the best price, with the most flexible financing and the best user and reseller experience. In this context, one innovation that has proved enormously popular is HV.Select’s rolling 30-day reseller contract. Having a contract term of just 30 days instead of a year or more minimises the risk for resellers should a customer default and gives them more flexibility in setting terms with their customers. Another is the online portal through which resellers and customers manage all aspects of the solution. This, explains Gareth Long, Daisy Wholesale product manager for UC&C, makes HV.Select easy to implement and use. “It’s all very well having the best solution, but setting up a hosted system also involves the complication of building an offering and porting users. So, the other thing we wanted to give resellers was a one-stage auto-journey. With BT, we created a portal that supports the reseller through the end-to-end journey, from porting numbers to setting up features or adding additional features, such as call recording and data analytics,” he said. This ease of use makes HV.Select particularly attractive to channel partners that might be new to telephony services, such as mobile or IT resellers. “We are seeing two areas of growth with HV.Select,” explained Long. “We are seeing more dedicated mobile resellers going into the traditional line space by offering a hosted service that they see as very similar to a mobile sale in the way it is commercially designed. And we are seeing huge growth with IT resellers who see the IP phone as just another endpoint. Whoever owns the network in an office generally has the best opportunity to add services. The IT reseller already controls the connectivity, the network and the servers, so why wouldn’t they provide HV.Select as well and lock out their competitors?” The whole journey Resellers that do sell HV.Select should also benefit from greater customer retention, Daisy Wholesale, the fastest growing part of the Daisy Group, sells a broad range of communications products and services to resellers, including lines and calls, broadband, mobile and Ethernet connections. In support of its ambition to deliver a fully converged solution to help resellers maximise the Daisy Group CEO Neil Muller has placed customer adoption of cloud technology at the centre of his strategy to power the success and growth of UK business. A new way of working Neil Muller ...continued Gareth Long, Product Manager for UC&C, Daisy Wholesale