Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Jola is a multi-award-winning mobile data aggregator, which means we offer services from all the major UK networks and hundreds of networks globally. We sell a wide range of options, including Fixed IP and Private APN, and we are a well-established, channel-only company. On average, we launch two new products and product extensions every month, so you will always have a differentiated offering and avoid being commoditised. We have our own IP addresses and number ranges, and our superfast HA network runs over Cloudflare, the world’s #1 DDOS protection company. We operate in many different vertical markets with market-leading specialists, so we understand the specific needs of each vertical and can help you productise your proposition. We give you complete control over your global SIM estate with Mobile Manager, which has been developed over eight years into an award-winning, market leading portal. If you choose, your customers can also have access to our white-label portal so they can see directly how much data they are using in each device and make decisions accordingly. We help you uncover opportunities and win them with solutions end users just cannot buy from anyone else. Our objective is to help you reduce churn, increase ARPU and improve the overall value of your business.

Scale

It's so scalable. Jola activated 10,000 SIMs in ten minutes for one of our partners and they didn't have to add any more people in billing or accounts to support the project. SIMs provision immediately using our Mobile Manager platform, so you don’t have to wait months to start generating recurring margins. As soon as customers put SIMs into devices, you’re billing them. Mobile Manager gives you total control to pause, swap, upgrade or cease SIMs in real-time. Mobile Manager is connected to the networks in real-time with instant alerts and triggers, so you can manage cost, maximise margin, and keep your customers happy.

Margin

People think mobile data is very low revenue and you have to win hundreds of thousands. You don't. You can often get a decent ARPU of £10 to £15 on thousands of devices and sometimes margins in excess of 40%, so it's a really attractive line-of-business to pivot into.

Winning deals

We help you uncover opportunities and win them with solutions end users just cannot buy from anyone else. We have a six-step process to help you go from a standing start to building a very profitable recurring revenue stream from mobile data.

Summary

There is high demand for mobile data from your existing customers. It is an easy product to sell, provision, support and bill. We have partners who have doubled the value of their business, increased their ARPU and reduced churn by focusing on mobile data.

Your customers are working on mobile data projects right now. If you get this right, you will quickly generate high margin recurring revenue and, due to higher EBITDA multiples for mobile data, increase the value of your company. Your mobile data partner will need to give you the tools to win these deals, usually competing with the direct sales arms of the mobile networks. Your supplier will need to be an aggregator with access to all the networks. Ideally they will also be an independent MVNO, providing access to all the UK mobile networks and hundreds of operators globally. Most importantly everything must be automated, with real-time APIs offering zero-touch provisioning and management through a single self-service portal. They will need to be innovative, with a constant stream of relevant mobile data and IoT products that the networks would take years to develop and launch. Mobile data is easy to sell, support and bill, when you partner with the right channel supplier.

Real-time Management Portal

When we first started working on major mobile data bids with our partners, none of the tenders even mentioned self-service portals. Today nearly 30% include parent-child online management panels as a minimum requirement. 

It’s no surprise that we see this change primarily in second generation projects. End user companies that have rolled out multi-site IoT/M2M deployments have found them impossible to manage manually. From capacity management to usage and fault diagnosis, everything is so much easier with real-time control. 

When these projects come up for renewal the need for a comprehensive portal moves from Desired to Essential. With specialist third party bid consultants involved in helping companies write tenders, this is only going to increase.

According to McKinsey, revenues from mobile data are set to increase dramatically over the next five years. Factors driving growth are the availability, speed and reliability of 4G, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT). Fortune Business Insights predict this market will be worth £1085 billion by 2027.

The opportunity for the channel is significant. We may not find ourselves supplying car manufacturers with SIMs for self-driving cars, but ICT resellers already have strong relationships with business customers for IT infrastructure, asset tracking, digital signage, mobile WiFi, monitoring and utilities.

Mobile data is an easy product to sell and provision and needs very little support. Jola took on just under 200 new partners in 2021 and now has over 1000. COVID-related projects fuelled early demand but these temporary revenue streams were quickly dwarfed as our partners’ customers started to look at mobile data projects they had on the back burner. We recently put 30,000 multinetwork SIMs into iPads for one of our partners’ public sector projects.

In the channel we are seeing an exponential rise in demand for mobile data SIMs and not only for use in 5G/4G routers, pre-Ethernet connectivity and Ethernet back-up. Mobile data SIMs are being fitted into signage, gaming machines, vending machines, monitoring devices, sensors and ATMs as standard. SIMs are being used in wind and solar farms, measuring and tracking key variables.  They are also used in smart TV cameras, which roam internationally. Everyday manufacturers and service companies are finding new uses for mobile data and, as we accelerate towards 5G, this is unlikely to slow down.

1. With 4G+ download speeds around 300Mb/s available to 90%+ of the population, mobile data is now a credible alternative to fixed line, as well as a great 100% SLA, backup story. It is also the only practical solution to replace millions of PSTN lines in the next few years. Only around 20% of resellers sell mobile data but by 2025 every reseller in the UK will have to have it in their portfolio. As is always the case with disruptive technological change, early movers win more market share and ringfence their customers from competitors.
   
2. Every reseller/MSP has at least one significant IoT/M2M opportunity in their existing base of customers, and mobile data aggregators like Jola are helping to find and win them. Resellers need experienced hands-on support with key customers, so the only practical option is channel-only suppliers, with a proven track record and robust processes.
   
3. The financial markets value mobile data EBITDA at least twice the multiple of fibre and broadband. With self-service, fully automated portals like Mobile Manager, it is easy to sell, manage and bill.

4. Mobile data is more than just IoT. Vendors offering too few options and no control will fail to connect with the thousands of resellers trying to develop differentiated and converged solutions for their customers.
   

 Jola

Jola is a mobile data aggregator and MVNO, which means that we offer services from all major UK networks and hundreds of networks globally. We have been selling mobile data to the channel since 2014, and we understand our partners’ pain points and the needs of their end-users in each vertical market. Over time, we have developed a unique portal that gives you the control and visibility you need to manage global SIM estates – control you can even extend to your customers. We have also developed unique hardware solutions that save our partners time, helping them create a great customer experience, maximise their margins and minimise costs for their customers.

Choose an aggregator

Jola is a multi-award-winning MVNO and mobile data aggregator, which means we offer services from all the major UK networks and hundreds of networks globally. We sell a wide range of options, including Fixed IP and Private APN, and we are a well-established, channel-only company. On average, we launch two new products and product extensions every month, so you will always have a differentiated offering to resist being commoditised. We have our own IP addresses and number ranges, and our superfast HA network runs over Cloudflare, the world’s #1 DDOS protection company.

Choose an automated management portal

We give you complete control over your global SIM estate with Mobile Manager, which has been developed over eight years into an award-winning, market leading portal. Should you wish, your customers can also have access to our white-label portal so they can see directly how much data they are using in each device and make decisions accordingly. We help you uncover opportunities and win them, with solutions end users just cannot buy from anyone else. Our objective is to help you reduce churn, increase ARPU and improve the overall value of your business.

Make sure you can bill and support solutions easily

We work with partners to help them overcome the traditional pitfalls in billing and support to ensure your customers remain happy with the solution they have bought from you and continue to buy from you.

Jola celebrated its 8^th birthday recently, after a year of growth that saw revenues surge by 80% and EBITDA double.

Jola also had its best year for signing new partners with ICT resellers, MSPs and specialists choosing Jola for their mobile data and intelligent connectivity.

Jola continued its relentless product development, with a string of new products designed to help Jola partners differentiate their offerings and win major deals from the mobile networks direct.

There are very few administrators and support staff in Jola, in fact despite doubling the number of Jola partners in the last 18 months to over 1000, calls and tickets into the company have decreased. We have obsessed over removing human intervention from all processes, and since 2016 invested millions in real-time automation and intuitive, white-label, self-service portals. More than 40% of our 50+ staff are employed in sales and marketing. Their objective is simply to help our partners win more business, and we recruit 15-20 new partners every month. 

A major advantage of our approach is that we can deal with resellers and MSPs of any size and we don’t need to sit behind companies trying to build a channel themselves. The mobile data market is competitive and there’s no reason for resellers to give up some of their margins to a third party whose only purpose is to compensate for the mobile aggregator’s lack of sales capability and automation.

Vendor partnerships are much more effective than simple supplier-customer relationships, especially when considering new products or new markets. If your vendor is ‘sell-through’ rather than ‘sell-to’ they will have a lot of experience of what works in different verticals and they will be able to talk in detail about their case studies. Probably more importantly they will know the pitfalls to avoid, and they can help your conversion by steering you away from bids you are unlikely to win.

Of course, this only works if you trust them, which means they have to be channel-only and be able to point to a track record of selling exclusively through resellers. Some of your bigger customers will be tempted to try and go direct once they learn the identity of your vendor-partner. You must feel confident that they will not only close this conversation down but do it in a positive way that does not jeopardise the deal or your overall relationship with your customer. 

Jola’s experience in the mobile data market is that most end-user customers have an application for IoT/M2M. They either don’t realise it or they don’t consider the MSP/Reseller able to fulfil their needs in this area. Against this, they would much rather buy from existing suppliers, particularly where they need help in defining the project and possible solutions. 

Jola has productised the process of engaging with customers on mobile data and called it the Mobile Data Revenue Generator (The MRG). This unique process defines the way we work together and qualifies opportunities, capabilities and skills. We help our partners to fill gaps in their capabilities and ultimately win large, high margin, long-term contracts.

Why is this such a hot topic at the moment and is it relevant to my business?

Have you ever had a situation where it was critical to hire a new person and you struggled to find them in time? Maybe you only received a few CVs and the ones you did interview were not up to the mark?

We needed to hire new marketing recruits at Jola. We attracted over 100 strong applications. What did we do differently?

Firstly we looked at our job advertisement and test-marketed the copy with people we knew would be great for the job. We found out through this process that we were putting off our target audience with the way we were describing the company. We were missing the opportunity to sell things we can offer candidates that other businesses recruiting similar roles couldn’t. We were putting up entry barriers by using jargon and insisting on very specific experience.

We not only changed the language and tone of our advert, but also added salary details, benefits and described what it is actually like working at Jola. We highlighted the career development potential, training and mentoring available and refocussed our copy on the values we were looking for. We looked at challenges faced by working parents, we looked at day-to-day challenges, getting to work, hours of work, place of work and made some significant changes.

All employees can work from home and no longer need to work 9-5. Our entire marketing team works part-time hours around their children. It is acceptable to take time off or work remotely to solve problems at home. We promote our inclusive culture. We encourage all types of diversity welcoming employees with neurodiversity and from the deaf community. We benefit from the complimentary skillsets which help drive the business forward.

Jola celebrates its 8^th birthday in April 2022, after a year of growth that saw revenues surge by 80%, EBITDA double, and an investment from BGF that valued the company at over £40m.

Jola also had its best year ever for signing new partners with over 1000 resellers and MSPs now choosing Jola for their mobile data and intelligent connectivity.

Jola also continued its relentless product development, with a string of new products designed to help Jola partners differentiate their offerings and win major deals from the mobile networks direct.

Apart from innovative Layer 2 LTE offerings for ISPs and unique big data tariffs, Jola built a new, fully redundant, highly scalable IP edge network specifically designed to deliver high performance and secure mobile data services. Jola Partners’ critical services now enjoy protection from DDoS attacks and super-high speeds globally via the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare’s 121 Tbps worldwide network blocks an average of 86 billion threats per day.

Andrew Dickinson, CEO of Jola commented, “We have just closed the books on our seventh full year and won Megabuyte’s Emerging Star award for the Best performing Telecoms Services company for the second year running. We continue to grow and to invest in people, products, platforms and processes. We have a fantastic team here at Jola who are dedicated to supporting our growing partner base. It is great to see so many Jola partners building profitable revenue streams from our unique mobile data solutions.”