The telecommunications arm of pub retailing business and brewer Marston's PLC is gearing up for channel expansion following a period of sustained and significant growth, according to Head of Telecoms Rob Derbyshire.
Last year, Marston's Telecoms broke through 25 per cent growth, accelerating away from the 18 per cent growth it recorded a year earlier. "2016 is more about consolidation, so we expect low double digit growth before targeting another 25 to 30 per cent in financial year 2017/2018," explained Derbyshire.
The appeal of Marston's Telecoms' proposition to the channel is undeniable, and Derbyshire plans to leverage the market gains already made to the advantage of a growing number of resellers. "We're aiming to be far more established within the channel community," he stated. "We have a wealth of expertise in Marston's that we leverage to support of our partners."
Marston's Telecoms was formed in 2008 by Mike McMinn, Group IT Director at Marston's PLC, to generate savings for the group through purchasing comms services on a wholesale basis. A big turning point for Marston's Telecoms was its transformation into a true wholesale provider of comms services. "What we haven't done well to date is properly articulate our offer to prospective partners," added Derbyshire. "This is why we're actively engaging with the channel and focusing on partner recruitment. Resellers seem to gravitate towards our personal experience in rolling out larger solutions. Most are looking to develop their proposition not only in SMB but also moving into larger corporate and flagship accounts."
According to Derbyshire, The deployment of Marston's Telecoms own network gave it a competitive edge in the retail space. "Our current focus is on our second core network upgrade in 20 months," he explained. "This is necessary due to the bandwidth required by customers and all of the interconnects we need with other carriers to offer an agnostic service. For the size of our business, this is a significant investment. We'll have a 50 gigabit core network in London delivered on state of the art chassis routers. This should provide our resellers with the reassurance that Marston's Telecoms is here to stay."
From a telecoms perspective, leveraging its PLC ownership has allowed Marston's to buy well from suppliers and in turn pass this benefit on to its channel partners. "We are also well positioned in that we understand first-hand what end users want because that is how we started," added Derbyshire. "So when it comes to assisting channel partners in delivering the right solution for larger bids we are able to provide relevant expertise."
Hosted VoIP and connectivity are the key growth products, although that's tempered by declining costs in connectivity, noted Derbyshire. "While customers are buying greater volumes of bandwidth it's still a race to the bottom," he stated. "We need to continue to innovate and drive down costs to remain competitive. Moving into 2016/17 we are developing software to provide partners with a greater depth of analytics so they can better manage their business."
The expectation of resellers from a support perspective has been a significant learning curve, pointed out Derbyshire. "We were originally geared up to support our parent company, a large PLC, and we've had to change our processes and add people to be able to support resellers in the way we want to," he explained. "Customer support is important to us so it is something we are constantly evaluating.
"Our growth will come from supporting a diverse and innovative reseller channel, and their growth will lead to ours. We will look for new ways to assist their growth and we won't be afraid to explore new avenues. The partnerships we develop have far greater substance than simply passing on a telecoms commodity. Our success is dependent on our partners' success so they really are the Marston's focus."
To bolster its support for partners Marston's Telecom is investing in more tools that will enable resellers to own the whole lifecycle of a product without needing to refer to the company. "This is still very much a work in progress, but we recognise it is key to growth in the channel," added Derbyshire. "That, and leveraging the benefits of SDN via these sorts of tools can offer partners a much more flexible solution."
The challenge of positioning Marston's Telecoms against larger market alternatives is also the company's big opportunity to articulate its point of difference, believes Derbyshire. "Financial strength, continuous investment, using what we sell and having a big FTSE 250 using our services are key reasons for resellers to partner with us," he added. "This is an exciting time for the channel. There's tremendous noise around hosted VoIP and coupled with greater connectivity demands this lends itself to a persuasive sell."•