01732 759725 20 INTERVIEW is driving decent scale. Another is having really good products that you can market and automate. And the third is making sure we’ve got a really strong point of differentiation. Giacom dovetails beautifully with those three elements – their craft, their knowledge, their know-how, their access to the channel are very complementary to our strengths…We are leaning on Giacom’s expertise to make sure we’ve got the right products, the right services, and Giacom are using us to find points of differentiation, so it works quite well.” Best of breed Giacom CEO Terry O’Brien adds that Giacom’s partnership with Sky Business Wholesale is consistent with its goal to give partners easy access to best-of-breed technology. “The connectivity market is not getting any simpler in terms of breadth of product or choice and that brings complexity to channel partners – who do you work with to make sure you’ve got the right offering for your end customers? That complexity continues to be a challenge. “And it’s not just complexity from a connectivity perspective. Small business customers more and more want a strategic partner to help them on their journey with innovation and technology. They don’t want to go to multiple sources. So, our partners have to do much more in terms of looking after their end customers and helping them get the benefits of technology. “Our job is to make this complex landscape and choice a little bit easier, and a little bit simpler for the 12,000 to 15,000 technology partners looking after small businesses in the UK. Our intention is to work with the best-of-breed across all our portfolio and we see Sky as definitely one of them, with an incredible network, an incredible team of people, an incredible appetite to be disruptive and bring something fresh to the UK channel community and SMB.” He points out that the partnership is in its early stages but will continue to develop over the coming months. “We’re in market already with Ethernet services. We have been for some time and it’s going really well. In February/ March time, we will start to introduce FTTP services to the portfolio and then continue to expand from there. Who knows where it will lead? Sky’s portfolio of products is pretty incredible. People don’t realise the heritage they have in b2b and the products and services that they offer, so it could flourish in directions we’re not planning right now. Who knows, maybe the channel will need TV at some point.” O’Brien adds that while Sky’s channelfirst product portfolio already provides differentiation, for example with WiFi and security and CPE, there is potential to co-create solutions that leverage Giacom’s other relationships. “We are exploring what our shared portfolios look like and how we bring them together as we go to market together. Sky will bring a lot of the product capability to bear in terms of what we go to market with, but we do have a wider portfolio that can help differentiate what we bring to the channel with Sky.” However the relationship develops, O’Brien is confident it will give an added Last month Sky Business Wholesale signalled its commitment to the channel with the announcement of a long-term strategic partnership with Giacom, a leading provider of technology and services for channel partners serving UK small businesses. The partnership will see Giacom distribute Sky Business Wholesale solutions combining connectivity and services such as WiFi, mobile backup and cybersecurity. As the wholesale arm of Sky’s business-to-business division Sky Business (rebranded in May following the merger of Sky Business TV and Sky Connect), Sky Business Wholesale offers a portfolio of high-speed connectivity products based on the Comcast Corporation-owned company’s fibre-first network. These include Ethernet services offering uncontended connections backed by service level guarantees; FTTP for smaller businesses with less exacting data requirements; and Sky business broadband packages. Initially, Giacom partners will be able to support customers’ growing bandwidth demands with Sky’s layer-2 Ethernet services, with additional products due to be introduced in 2024. Seamless integration between the self-service Giacom Cloud Market portal and Sky provisioning systems ensures a smooth order journey for partners and their customers. Damian Saunders, Managing Director of Sky Business Mid-Market & Wholesale, points out that Sky Business Wholesale has been monetising Sky’s infrastructure and assets for four or five years and that following several years of 40% CAGR it is now ramping up its efforts in the channel to drive scale. “Sky Business Wholesale is really key for us and has enjoyed quite aggressive growth since its inception, trading exclusively as a kind of proof of concept for layer 2 Ethernet. That is where we started, and that success has enabled us to invest and broaden the product portfolio. What we’re gearing up to do now is drive ultimate scale and the b2b channel is critical to that. “We’re on a quest for three things. One Technology Reseller talks to Terry O’Brien and Damian Saunders about the strategic partnership between Giacom and Sky Business Wholesale Together in connectivity
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