Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

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.”

Telephone lines as we know them will not exist in a few years’ time. As BT starts to close down telephone exchanges in favour of a 100% IP (Internet Protocol) network, millions of end users will need to consider if they need a physical connection and if they want to keep their traditional telephone number.

For many applications (e.g. lifts, ATMs, door entry systems, alarms, digital signage, street lighting) changing out a telephone line for a broadband circuit is unnecessary, expensive or impossible. A mobile broadband connection is the ideal solution for these end customers but what if they don’t want a mobile phone number and prefer to retain their traditional phone number?

Millions of new connections represent a significant opportunity for the channel and Jola has a lot of experience in helping their 1000+ partners to find and win these deals.

Furthermore, Jola is the only mobile data aggregator to also run and manage their own SIP network. Built on their experience in SIP, Mobile Data and number porting they have recently launched products specifically designed for the channel to help them take advantage of this aspect of the impending PSTN switch-off.

Adrian Sunderland said “Jola’s PSTN replacement packages are the perfect solution for MSPs, ISPs and resellers looking for a slick wholesale solution, managed end-to-end via a real-time fully API integrated portal. Millions of telephone lines will take time to migrate and we are already seeing massive projects kicking off as companies wake up to the challenges and choices ahead. This is a great opportunity for Jola partners to become first-mover experts in what is going to be the hottest sector in telecommunications over the next few years.”

There are millions of PSTN lines that won’t be able to use a SoGEA or FTTP type replacement due to costs, incompatibility or logistical challenges. Mobile data will be a requirement for customers replacing PSTN lines for intruder alarm monitoring, call points and many other applications. Jola works with partners to uncover these opportunities. Recent case studies are as follows:

Intruder alarm monitoring

Our partner has a customer with 13,000 PSTN lines used to monitor intruder alarms and fire alarms in properties, both commercial and residential, all over the UK. We suggested a Dual SIM Robustel Router with dual MultiNet SIMs for resilience and a 500MB aggregated pool of data to be shared across all sites. We added a Private APN to the solution to ensure secure remote access to each device. The solution we provided met the security standards required and by sending pre-configured routers to site we were able to ensure a smooth set up process for engineers, a great margin for our partner and reduced costs for the end-customer. The end customer saved around £90,000 in monthly rentals and nearly £2m in set-up charges. Jola included some software customisation to make the Robustel routers 100% plug-and-play and the partner took a £1.2m pa contract at an average margin of 40%.

Taxi Freephone and Info Call Points

There are a significant number of phone boxes in hospitals, supermarkets and hotels allowing you to book a taxi or receive information for free. Each one of these call points will need to be upgraded as they will no longer work after the PSTN Switch-off. We had a partner who won a deal to upgrade 650 analogue call points in hospitals, hotels and hospitality venues. The biggest challenge they faced was the high upfront costs of replacing the hardware. We provided Robustel routers with an Analogue Telephone Adaptors (ATA) SIP Overlay service and calls over IP. We provided MultiNet SIMs with pooled data to be shared across all sites. The partner won a £600,000 annual contract and the end customer saved over £13,000 a month and nearly £200,000 in CAPEX.

According to Statista, there are over 29.3m PSTN lines and over 4.2m ISDN lines in the UK. Every residential customer with a PSTN line will need to move to an alternative solution to continue making calls on a landline and accessing the internet. Every business in the UK will need to review their internal communications and replace both PSTN and ISDN lines. Customers may find that they can get faster speeds more cost-effectively using 4G/5G routers and a data SIM card.

There are millions of PSTN lines that won’t be able to use a SoGEA or FTTP type replacement due to costs, incompatibility or logistical challenges. Mobile data will be a requirement for customers replacing PSTN lines for lift emergency calling, alarm signalling, telecare and many other applications.

What is available from Jola?

The PSTN Replacement Toolkit contains a choice of connectivity (Fixed Line, Mobile, Leased Line), voice over GSM or voice over SIP. It also includes cellular or SIP gateway hardware, options for either porting existing numbers or adding new UK numbers. Everything is managed through our market-leading, fully-automated, white label, provisioning portal - SIP Manager.

The ISDN Replacement Toolkit comprises SIP Trunks (including bundled inclusive calls or unbundled wholesale pricing), resilient SIP trunk options (resilient server side and/or client side), and flexible inbound and outbound routing. UK, international and non-geographic number porting is provided via portal or API.