technologyreseller.co.uk 37 continued... offering because it’s quite labour-intensive – for us, because we have to do a lot of the work with them. and perhaps for them too. Some dealers don’t want to sell products like Ethernet or mobile, but they have a relationship with an end user and ultimately it’s about wallet share. If you’ve got a great relationship, why don’t you sell-in these products that you’ve never sold before, because we’ll do a lot of the work for you. MP: I think on the dealer side as well, they recognise the fact that if they don’t sell them, someone else will and then will try to cross-sell their products into that customer. By offering everything they keep the customer quite sticky. TR: Having UC solutions must be a big benefit at the moment? PG: It’s hugely important to have it because, again, it’s very competitive. We’ve seen a lot of very successful providers out there. At one point, there was something like 130 hosted telephony providers in the UK. Now I think people know what they want and they know the price point it needs to be at. So for us, again, it’s working at a technical level with the underlying software that we use to make sure that resellers can shape it into a saleable product. The feedback we get about our product is that is very saleable; the aesthetics of the UI are very good; and, again, partners can do everything from one place. Being in a competitive marketplace, you’ve got to be able to stand out in terms of what it integrates with and what the future looks like. TR: Presumably your resellers would have transferred most of their customers onto a hosted solution already. PG: I think the end user sometimes gets forgotten about, and a lot of end users have been around the hosted telephony carousel many times. For resellers that might have a partnership with two providers, it’s about making sure that partnership doesn’t stagnate. If your current provider isn’t working on a solid roadmap and not considering what the future looks like, they’ll get found out when the end user suddenly says ‘does yours do this, does it do that?’. I think resellers have seen a lot of the providers out there but I’m proud to say that our solution is awardwinning and we’re winning a lot of resellers based on the product itself. So, yes, it’s an exciting time. TR: One of the strengths of Voip Unlimited is its broad product and services offering, but within that you also provide choice. MP: We have two UC platforms and we have four SIP Trunking platforms. We’ve looked at the market and recognise people use different products for different reasons and have built products to fit those requirements. If we see something in a competitor’s product that we think is a good idea, we’ll build something similar. We don’t buy products off the shelf. We build a platform to requirements and then occasionally someone comes along and says ‘wouldn’t it be good if we could do this?’. Then, we’ll just add that feature to that platform. PG: Landline plus is something we get asked about more. The switch-off is a hot topic because it’s been delayed. That delay may be good because micro business owners don’t really understand, and to an extent probably don’t care about, what’s happening. So, it’s really important for us in the reseller marketplace to educate the end user that switching over is not a big thing. It’s hard for resellers to sell to the micro business owner because the cost of sale is high and the return is low, so having a product that is easy to sell, easy to roll out and easy for the end user to adopt is also important. odd projects, which is enjoyable. PG: We do, and I think we’re becoming quite good at making ‘difficult’ products easy to consume and, most importantly, easy to sell. We’ve got two projects running with two separate AI companies and when we bring those to market, I’m confident the feedback will be ‘Oh, that’s a really good idea. We can really sell that to our market’. We started working on AI a long time ago and I think the resellers will really like what we bring out. The two products do different things, but they’ll both fit into a reseller’s portfolio and enable them to offer a consumable AI product set to their end users that is easy for them to consume from us. MP: Once people start playing with those products, we’re expecting them to say ‘how about if we do this, how about if we do that’. So we’re expecting mini-projects to come off the back of that, for specific resellers or for specific customer requirements. TR: Which you’ll be able to deliver with your in-house capabilities. I understand you’re also about to start offering mobile Sims? MP: We’re playing in the market with a couple of bits and pieces that are different to current offerings out there. We look at the commercial element and the technical element and try to get both to marry up to create something of use to anybody. PG: It’s a hugely commoditised market as well. We have to ask ourselves is it worth it? We’re very late to the party to bring out just Sims. It’s about the applications and how you deliver them and the verticals you put them into. We’ve thought long and hard about that and how we bring them to market. I’m excited to get going with that. TR: Are some of your partners new to connectivity and comms? PG: It is a hugely commoditised market and very few will not have done all the things we’re talking about because they’re in that market. They are technology resellers. What is quite good about the dealer arm of our business – and we’ve got hundreds of dealers – is that we’re one of very few now that still have a dealer Q&A Paul Gibbs
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