technology
reseller.co.uk
Q&A
15
Q&A
Technology Reseller
speaks to Nick Goodenough, Partner Service
Manager at Spitfire, about opportunities in voice and data and
how Spitfire can help IT resellers make the most of them
in 2006, have helped Spitfire to extend its
reach nationwide.
Technology Reseller
recently caught up
with Nick Goodenough to find out more
about Spitfire’s offering for IT resellers.
Technology Reseller (TR)
:
Nick, please
could you tell our readers a little about
Spitfire’s Partner Service.
Nick Goodenough (NG):
We set up the
Partner Service in 2001 and realised
almost immediately that there was this
real demand from IT resellers for a trusted
partner, and by that I mean a company
that can help them move into new
areas, by giving them the right advice,
proper training and, if necessary, sales
support – someone to go with them to see
customers and engineers who can assist
their engineers. That’s what we did from
the beginning with the Partner Service.
We’ve got 400 active partners and over
500 signed up partners. Some of them
are very small and will give us only very
occasional business, but we don’t mind
that. We don’t set targets. We know that
if we do a good job and help partners to
grow their business we’re going to benefit.
I think the word partnership is overused,
but that is what we offer — we work hand
in hand with IT resellers; we’ve got boots
on the ground, people who can actually
support them in the provision of our
products and services.
TR
:
What services do you provide?
NG:
Basically the full range of internet and
telecom solutions for SME businesses,
everything from a business broadband
circuit costing £15 a month to much higher
quality broadband circuits designed to carry
voice and Ethernet circuits – more expensive
but far higher quality internet circuits with
colossal amounts of bandwidth, 100Mbps,
1Gbps, 10Gbps, 100Gbps.
What we specialise in is helping partners
who’ve got multi-site customers to link those
sites together. The traditional way was to
put in point-to-point circuits, an expensive
private circuit running between site A and
site B. We provide much less expensive
and simpler ways of doing this using IP
Engineering technology called MPLS,
whilst also allowing extremely high quality
connectivity into the big cloud providers
like Amazon AWS, Microsoft 365, Microsoft
Azure, Google and so on.
Today, there’s a real move in use of the
Internet from it being a very open thing to
controlled, quality connectivity between a
customer’s sites or between their site and
Microsoft 365, say. Consumer internet is all
about speed, how fast
you can do stuff, but for
businesses, it should be
all about quality – the
quality of the bandwidth
and its reliability,
so that if it does
go down you have
proper resilience,
with backup
circuits and a
properly considered
Business Continuity
plan.
The connectivity
bit is key, because
this underpins a
series of other
services, one of
which is voice. Anybody can make a call
over the internet; the key thing is for the
quality of that call to be as good as ISDN
and traditional phone lines. We’ve got
customers like Arsenal Football Club who
still use ISDN for radio broadcasts because
it offers perfect quality. If we’re moving a
customer from that onto some form of voice
over IP, the quality has to be just as good.
Our starting point when providing voice
solutions to resellers is a) to ensure the
product is good quality, for example by
using the right type of internet circuits
rather than just putting voice over any old
broadband; and b) to train resellers so that
they have the benefit of our experience
dating back to 1988. Whether they are new
to voice or have been doing it for several
years, we make sure they understand
everything that needs to be done to ensure
quality is perfect.
The third key aspect is security. There’s
a huge amount of fraud linked to telephony
systems, whether they’re cloud or hosted or
onsite. Criminals who hack into a system
and make calls to premium numbers
in countries like Somalia can rack up
The convergence of voice and data has
presented IT resellers with a golden
opportunity to expand into voice – and
most have grabbed it with both hands.
Nick Goodenough, Partner Service
Manager at independent voice and data
solution supplier Spitfire, estimates that
currently 90% of IT resellers offer data
circuits, with two thirds selling voice.
He argues that the take-up of voice
would be even higher were it not for the
fact that some resellers pulled back when
they found out voice wasn’t just another
data application but required a lot of
thought and was highly dependent on a
quality connection.“This,” he told
Technology
Reseller
, “is where choosing the right
supplier makes a big difference.” By which,
of course, he means Spitfire.
Spitfire was founded in London in
1988, initially as a telecoms company,
selling, installing and maintaining telephone
systems for business customers. In the ‘90s
and ‘00s, it diversified, adding telephone
lines, internet connections and additional
voice and data solutions to its product
portfolio, including the multiple award-
winning SIP Communicator hosted PBX.
In 2001, Spitfire supplemented its direct
sales business with the establishment of
its Partner Service indirect sales channel.
Today, it has more than 500 signed-up
partners responsible for slightly over half
of the company’s £25 million turnover. A
growing reseller network, and the opening of
a Midlands office in Redditch, Birmingham
Nick Goodenough,
Partner Service
Manager,
Spitfire
We’ve got 400
active partners
and over 500
signed up
partners
Continued...
EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
SPITFIRE: PARTNER SERVICE
