The channel is witnessing huge changes in the connectivity landscape but mapping out how the lie of the land will shape up is no easy task. Here, we report on a round table discussion (hosted by Comms Dealer and supported by Zen Internet) that served as a compass point for the future direction of market developments.
There was a time when the roll out of fibre to all premises took the form of a cohesive nationwide plan. If the idea had been rubber stamped the UK's broadband infrastructure would look very different today, and industry debates about the provision of complex connectivity would be unfounded. However, the first UK-wide fibre blueprint was shelved and as a consequence the provision of business grade connectivity has risen up the channel agenda at a time when significant cloud uptake is driving ever greater demand. Against this backdrop Zen Internet has taken a lead on all aspects of connectivity and is aiming to bring the same coherence and support to the market that was characteristic of the first overarching strategy to link up the nation.
Round table delegate William Poel, UK Tech and Commercial Evangelist at TouchCast, has been working in the industry since the 1970s and he shared his insights into the plan that could have rendered the round table debate null-and-void. His all-encompassing statement spanned 25 years of broadband development, reaching back to the big fibre roll-out plan and its ultimate demise, and extending forwards to the significant challenges faced by ground breaking technologists in the IP TV space today, who all, like the rest of us, rely on resilient and cohesive connectivity.
Poel, who wryly describes himself as 'still standing after too many years at the bleeding edge of HiTech', commented: "In the late 1980s the former CTO of BT, Peter Cochrane, put forward a plan to deliver fibre to every premises in the UK for £50 per end point. However, BT soon worked out the impact of this strategy on existing lucrative services so it shelved the idea. I've seen the plan, and it would still work today if the government was brave enough to enforce upon BT a mandate to overhaul the UK's infrastructure. But the whole situation has moved towards a vulcanised mess of various providers, and trying to get them all together in one coherent plan is worse than herding cats."
According to Poel, today's 'scattered' connectivity infrastructure and the general digging-in of fibre is no match for the growing connectivity demands of the nation. "Within 24 months a revolution could signal the end of scheduled broadcasting and the delivery of all TV via IP will take precedence," he stated. "This will impact massively on networks. Uptake of IP TV has until now been slow and hasn't yet crushed the networks but it's beginning to happen."
The language of networks wobbling at the knees under the weight of an all-IP TV world may veer towards hyperbole but the scenario nevertheless brings a number of issues into sharper focus and shines a spotlight in the crucial role played by provider such as Zen. According to David Dadds, Director at Vanilla IP, the challenge for comms providers will be to meet the connectivity needs of business users who, like IP TV customers, will expect the product to be on tap at all times wherever their location. "This may not be the big issue today, but in five years time we will need all of the pieces in place," he said.
With no master plan to build the big picture, the less desirable 'piecemeal' development of a future-proof comms infrastructure will have to do and the role of pioneers such as Zen Internet will be a critical success factor. The company's broadband, Ethernet and leased line portfolio is growing in popularity among its reseller base, and all of the round table delegates agreed that business grade connectivity is critical, but there was no consensus on how resiliency should be packaged and offered to customers.
"It is paramount to provide connectivity within an overall managed service and ensure it's good quality," said Simon Payne, Managing Director at Damovo.
David Bass, Director at Charterhouse Voice & Data, came out forcibly in favour of providing a primary circuit with back-up bundled in. "We aggregate bandwidth, so the industry should offer 100MG back-up at half the price or free with the primary circuit," he stated. But his stance on how back-up should be offered caused a stir and polarised the views of some delegates who saw this as a moral issue as well as a commercial one. Jason Horan, Managing Director at Connect Express, agreed that there is a moral issue at stake here. "You cannot offer hosted telephony without QoS," he said. "To force customers to buy QoS is wrong." Meanwhile, Michael Thornton, Managing Director at Frontier Voice and Data, did not accept that giving away a service that comes at a cost was the right modus operandi for any business.
If Cochrane's fibre roll out plan had been executed, not only would the nation have benefitted from a more cohesive network, customers would also be buying and using their services in a different way and the method of delivery would probably be standardised by comparison to today's, perhaps, over complicated set-up. Unable to wind back the clock, the time to debate next steps has arrived. Chief among the hot topics discussed around the table was the role of the reseller in driving a connectivity market where new opportunities are arising almost by the day, driven by the cloud, the changing dynamics of end user businesses and the broadening profile of ICT buyers. And the approach to selling connectivity depends very much on end user criteria such as size, budget and attitude to risk in terms of uptime.
But for Tim Wallis, Managing Director of TWS Computer Services, one big issue dominates his thinking: "I concentrate on SME, and my customers need connectivity that works," he stated. "The problem for many of them is that the winter storms have decimated their ADSLs. And because BT can't remove the trees, how do we provide resilience to customers on the end of a copper line and who can't have two circuits from two suppliers or exchanges? Without resilience, cloud services won't work. Many of my customers do not have a connectivity choice. I've gone down the satellite broadband route because that is back-up."
In areas of the market where establishing simple back-ups and SLAs are less of an issue, bundled services are the order of the day along with a different set of attendant challenges. Campbell Williams, Group Strategy and Marketing Director at Six Degrees Group, said: "Sometimes the worst approach to take is to bundle the cost so that the customer effectively gets 'all they can eat'. At some point the IT manager, the FD or MD will see that they've been paying a certain amount for the service, and because nothing has gone wrong the reseller is vulnerable to being undercut by a rival. You have to uncouple the value and educate the customer on what might have gone wrong and the value that has been added to the deal."
Williams also noted that the buying landscape has changed. "The new wave of CIOs and IT directors are not people dealing with network resilience problems," he added. "They have business conversations about profit and loss, trade-offs, upsides and downsides, risk and rewards. Larger corporations do not sit and discuss whether they need resilient connectivity. The cost of back-up and SLAs is less of an issue for them."
On the other hand, Frontier Voice and Data operates mainly in the 10-150 employee customer space where typically there is no board level IT leader. "We deal with IT people who don't have the skill set of CTOs and CIOs," stated Thornton. "The questions we are asked are more cost and product conscious. It's a different proposition. What they need is an understanding of the products that providers offer and where they can be delivered, and for what cost. That is all they are interested in."
Summing up the points, Ben Bradbury, Managing Director at Clarion, added: "We have to cater for companies whether they have small or large cheque books and explain the services to them, and it's the service provider's responsibility to tell us how much capacity there is in the network, where the latency is, the cost, and not just seek the upside. We have various connectivity choices and we have to cater for clients from remote areas right up the scale. Providers need to explain very clearly the price points and risks."
Unravelling the various strands of a connectivity proposition to make it simple to understand, buy and take to market is no easy task, particularly in an environment where resellers are over shadowed by the shades of grey that sometimes blurs the process. But Bradbury said the issue is clear cut. "Providers need to be working together with resellers to ensure the necessary bandwidth to support the services they provide," he said. "We need transparency and honesty to overcome the disconnect between cloud delivery and the connectivity."
Dominic Carroll, Senior Product Manager at Zen Internet, commented: "It's no longer about companies looking to deliver data services over private connectivity such as broadband, Ethernet and leased lines, it's more about how they deliver a converged network and the underlying infrastructure to facilitate that. Attention levels are heaped more on the services than the delivery method. But the emergence of new technologies and how we can take advantage of them to create a world class network that successfully delivers the services is just as big a talking point of differentiation."
According to Deborah Wrigley, Channel Sales Manager, Zen Internet has stolen the march on this issue by beating the education drum while Zen's hypercautious approach ensures the fitness of its business grade services. The company has, she says, turned its collaborative vision into a channel strategy that insulates reseller partners from the issues discussed and connectivity glitches that blight many deployments by resellers in general who tread a familiar - and doomed - path.
"Zen believes that good providers don't just provide a product, but also the training, guidance and expertise channel partners need to sell it," she said. "With the new Partner Programme, we're working harder than ever before to share our knowledge and expertise. There are huge opportunities out there. We want our partners to be able to take advantage of every one."
Poel's invocation of Cochrane's fibre roll out plan did not just highlight the piecemeal nature of the UK's network infrastructure, it also brought into clear view the opportunity for resellers in the SME market, an opportunity that perhaps would not be present if Cochrane had got his way. The lack of a coherent infrastructure, on the flip side, enables resellers to reaffirm their status as ICT suppliers cum consultants, especially among the smaller businesses which only have admin level IT support. "Sub-50 organisations tend not to have a CTO or IT manager," concurred Williams. "These companies need resellers to offer bespoke solutions. They are dependent on the reseller market for specialisation."
While Williams' argument underlined the value of SME resellers, Thornton wasted no time in sizing up the scale of the market. "There are 80,000 UK SMEs that need to know what the product is, the cost and how it works," he said. "Breaking down solutions into their component parts is very important."
Finding out what resellers need from connectivity suppliers should be, you would think, not too big a mountain to ascend. But climbing higher than base camp all too often proves to be a challenge. But with his climbing boots tightly laced up, Carroll outlined the route Zen Internet is taking to address the issues raised during this lively round table debate.
"Just as the requirements of end users vary significantly depending on the size of their business and the market they operate in, so do the needs of the ICT channel who supply them with connectivity services," he commented. "To serve the population of our resellers that 'just want connectivity to work' we have developed a range of services which can be purchased off the shelf as a fully managed option. These start from basic ADSL2+ and Fibre Broadband with business grade SLAs through to Ethernet Leased Lines with automatic failover to a broadband line for assurance and backup included as standard."•