Industry leaders say they will rely on resellers' skills and drive for change Recent research has indicated that digitalisation is set to disrupt many traditional industries and may even lead to the displacement of some traditional market leaders in IT and comms. Top of the list as ‘Most likely to be disrupted’ is the Telecoms Industry. So how should the industry adjust to meet this challenge, how does channel succeed in “the age of the platform” and what do they need to prioritise to succeed? These were amongst the issues debated by some of the industry’s leading figures when they met last week at the COMMS VISION CONVENTION, staged at Gleneagles, Scotland from 9-11 November 2016.
Alex Tempest, Director of Partners, TalkTalk Business, sees great opportunities for the channel in such areas as software defined networks, but to succeed they need to be aligned with the right provider and have the right technology “More importantly the reseller also has to have the right skill set to actually leverage that,” she said. “When we talk about innovation and technology, the key is resources and people. If you have the right resources and people and invest in them, then you will succeed.”
For Dave Assam, Head of Hosted Comms, BT Wholesale, the key is making the application easy to use. “That’s where you create the value - in making [the platform] easy to consume,” he said. “Our platform is constantly changing and constantly evolving and that sort of agility is essential in making applications easy to consume. The challenge is in constantly managing that service and access to it to ensure that it remains easy to consume.”
In his view, the value the channel provides and the reason it is needed is “because it is dynamic and adapts far faster than big companies can change because they are far better connected to their customers, listening to what they want and looking at their services. What we have to do is help support, educate and train and that’s a big area - helping the channel sales people understand what they’ve got to sell.” He believes that the channel is actually driving innovation by demanding integration of applications in order to better serve their customers. The different business models and skill sets within the channel is what creates the value.
For David Dadds, CEO of DRD, the key lies in automating access to the platform and the best means he sees of doing that is providing a full set of APIs. “As soon as you provide access via APIs you’ve got full automation and some of the credit control risks disappear and you are able to get really smart in working with the data,” he said. He also believes you need the right platform in place to deliver what the customer requires and, in terms of delivering cloud services, that is important to ensure you have the right contractual terms.
For Clayton Nash, Head of Products, CityFibre, the key is in managing customer relationships, understanding the customer’s business and understanding what they are trying to achieve. He also believes the opportunities to succeed are enormous. “Now is the most exciting time to be alive,” he said. “Anybody in this room can deliver 24/7 global data centres. We have all the tools we need and lots of choices. The opportunities are boundless the only issue is where we can keep all the money!”
The opportunities provided by software defined networks and other areas of software innovation will be amongst the subjects addressed at the European Software & Solution Summit 2017 which will be staged in London next March, For further details visit www.eusss.com