Source: Comms Dealer November
Up until 2005 most resellers simply sold an ISPs branded broadband in return for a once-off commission. It soon became apparent that they were letting competitors into their customer bases and actually broadband could be a lucrative recurring revenue stream for them. The issue was that nobody had come up with a simple way of ordering and managing broadband assets through a white-label portal. Then Griffin launched ‘ISP in a box’ and the market took off. By selling their own branded broadband services resellers were able to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and build their own brand therefore increasing the value of their companies and protecting their base from competitors.
Five years on the market for broadband is virtually saturated and most SMBs have either a broadband circuit or a leased line. What started as a faster way to send email and browse the web has turned into a method of linking offices, managing backups and accessing remote applications and data. Consequently there is a move away from internet-facing products in favour of secure, private, broadband and leased line products.
According to the Forrester report from August 2009 49% of SMBs (around 300,000 enterprises) have or are looking to buy an MPLS Wide Area Network (WAN) in the next two years. Driving this demand has been the need to connect remote workers, retail outlets and smaller sites to corporate networks as well as access remotely hosted data and applications
Larger enterprises have traditionally bought MPLS networks directly from the carriers but these are too expensive and too inflexible for the broader SMB market. In 2008 Griffin launched their ‘MPLS in a box’ solution offering a range of leased lines and broadband from all of the major carriers creating bespoke private networks. Pre-sales support and network design are included in the deal and because the intelligence is ‘in the cloud’ the reseller does not need expensive, complicated routers and an army of on-site engineers.
Every reseller has at least one high margin MPLS deal in their existing base and Griffin will even go as far as to help them find it. As we are channel-only and white label we are trusted to go with our reseller Partners to customer appointments to gather requirements and pitch solutions. Griffin wins 90% of MPLS and virtual hosting deals that go through their award-winning team.
According to Gartner by 2012 20% of businesses will own no IT assets and the SaaS market will show consistent growth through 2013 when worldwide revenue will balloon to around $16 billion. A large percentage of this is predicted to be hosted desktop and it is expected that in the UK 43% of SMBs will be looking to rent software by the seat and by the month.
Everything else being equal it is cheaper to rent software and store your data in the cloud than to buy software and run everything on your own servers in-house. But of course everything else is not equal - yet. Your Local Area Network (LAN) speed is probably at least 100Mbit/s but how many SMEs can afford a 100Mbit/s leased line? How many times does your LAN break down compared to how many times your broadband or leased line fails? Also consider this. How likely is it that a criminal will mount a sustained attack on your firewall to gain access just to your data housed on your own servers? The data of many hundreds or thousands of companies (including yours) stored in the cloud is far more attractive and so military grade cloud security is absolutely essential.
Whilst elsewhere in the world we have large global companies pushing managed services to businesses of all sizes, in the UK we have a well established channel. The small to medium sized business is often risk averse and if you’ve provided customers with an excellent service with broadband in the past, upgraded their solutions, designed and implemented their private network, there’s every chance they’ll be receptive to any managed services that you offer. By partnering with the right provider you can get the support you need to dramatically grow your business and become an MPLS and Cloud reseller in 5 days.
Come and meet Andrew Dickinson, Griffin’s Managing Director to find out more. (749)