Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Awareness and support for mental health has improved over the last few years. Organisations like Jola are inclusive and diverse. They provide all employees with private medical care and support for physical and mental conditions. Employees need to feel supported and valued within a business and channel businesses benefit from strong relationships with an experienced and successful team.

At Jola, we provide a safe environment for the neurodiverse and check in with them regularly. As a business, we provide confidential counselling and encourage holidays and social interaction with our team, such as family fun days and team nights out. 

About Jola

Jola is an award-winning, channel-only supplier of business communications specialising in mobile data SIMs. We are a global eSIM MVNO, providing innovative IoT and mobile data solutions to MSPs, ISPs, IT support companies and telecommunications resellers.

Integrations are important as they help businesses to improve performance, reduce costs and enhance customer relationships. UC improves productivity with simple click-to-call users when they are available and helps teams collaborate. Common integrations are Microsoft with Cisco and common CRM software.

Partners successful in this area are looking at how their businesses interact with customers and how this can be enhanced using unified communications. Vendors can help by identifying key use cases highlighting unique solutions to common problems.

Selling the benefits

According to Metrigy Research, companies that utilise integrated UC and CC solutions from a single vendor reported a nearly 100 per cent revenue increase, a 14 per cent cost decrease, a 57 per cent customer ratings improvement, and a 37 per cent agent efficiency improvement. 

By reducing the time spent switching between different communication platforms, UC allows employees to focus more on their tasks. With real-time sharing capabilities, employees can seamlessly connect from any location and device with an internet connection. This flexibility enables remote work, and international collaborations, and fosters a work-from-anywhere culture.

Unique, cost-effective managed solutions are the key to success for channel partners trying to win new business. End-users buy from suppliers they trust, who are responsive to their needs. Being a one-stop-shop for all of their requirements is important as is working with an aggregator.

Future

At the moment, the UC collaboration experience is all based on two dimensions video and screen sharing.  However, we already see our SIMs being used in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications in specialist industries with purpose-built tools and devices.  However, companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google are investing heavily in AR and VR for both consumers and businesses.  This combined with the widespread availability of 5G makes me think it won’t be too far away before the UC and Collaboration tools that we use every day start to open up AR and VR for widespread B2B use.

Cultural standing  

We assess the strength of our cultural standing against our core values. These are not advertised on our company walls they are ingrained in our behaviour. We put our partners first. We track how quickly calls are answered, how fast tickets are resolved and how happy our partners are with our service. The best measure of our cultural standing is the longevity of our staff.

Cultural priorities

We are accountable. We do what we say we are going to do. This is important as our partners trust us to respond quickly so they can get back to their customers. This impacts day-to-day behaviours as we honour our commitments and if we can’t, we let people know before the deadline and renegotiate so we don’t let each other or our partners down.

Cultural focus 

Right now we are focussed on the growth plan for financial year 24/25. To achieve the high targets we have set for ourselves, we need to recruit additional resources in sales, marketing and support. We will be recruiting against our values to find innovative, ambitious individuals, who will help partners to find, win and roll out unique solutions.

Cultural competitive advantage

We offer a unique environment to learn new skills, develop careers, and build a successful company. We offer competitive packages and the opportunity to be first to market with innovative solutions. The work is rewarding and the rewards are incentivising.

Living by our values

Our culture is driven and demonstrated by the founders of our business. It’s how we behave and how our team behaves. We share our success in company meetings, reward success in our appraisals and reflect on how we can improve our success. Culture is something that is learnt. You can see it in action in a company. It’s how things are done and how you get things done. It does not require a big budget.

What does it mean?

The ongoing PSTN switch-off represents a substantial business opportunity. Many major operators and resellers may underestimate the number of businesses using PSTN lines in locations where high-speed broadband is unnecessary. Resellers offering PSTN replacement solutions leveraging 4G find they are easy to sell. Many resellers will already be talking to their customers about the PSTN switch-off and guiding them towards appropriate solutions in plenty of time, potentially saving their customers money whilst making more margin.

Adapted offerings

Businesses don’t have ISDN, WLR3 or ADSL problems. Businesses have credit card payment processing, voice communication, security alarm monitoring and emergency lift line problems. The channel’s job is to be the trusted advisor and recommend the right solution for each problem. As a mobile broadband company, we’ve seen resellers use low-cost SIMs to solve all the problems mentioned above whilst saving their customers money and making more margin than they would be by simply pushing fibre-based solutions.

Retailers will need to replace single PSTN lines in lifts, payment terminals and alarm lines. Often mobile broadband solutions are faster, cheaper and more practical than fixed-line connectivity solutions. Selecting the right SIM package is key and managing the data costs is essential.

Jola helps partners uncover prospects with immediate requirements for mobile data SIMs. We help develop unique solutions to existing issues, they can't buy from anyone else at a competitive price for them and margin for partners. We are channel-only so by helping resellers fill their pipeline we are filling our own and can help pitch and close big deals. We are on hand to support MSPs and their customers throughout the buying process and post-sale and can help partners use this winning proposition to target and win similar deals.

In many workplaces, the option didn’t exist to regularly work remotely and as a result, companies didn’t necessarily provide the UC and collaboration tools required.  COVID changed all that and remote working became mandatory for most of us.  At first, we used the tools for multi-person video calls, but quickly started sharing screens and in many cases moved to mass participation web conferences.

Shift to all IP

We predict that the country will be split into businesses with type A and type B resellers. Type A resellers will already be talking to their customers about the PSTN switch-off and guiding them towards appropriate solutions in plenty of time, potentially saving their customers money whilst making more margin. Type B resellers will be too busy to worry about 2027, so they won’t proactively do anything about the PSTN switch-off.  As a result, they might lose some of their customers to the proactive Type A resellers. Alternatively, they will be having a very stressful time in 2027 when suddenly their customers are being bombarded by warnings coming from every direction about their services being disconnected and then rushing to prevent that from happening.

What partners want

Partners want easy solutions to brand, sell, support and bill. They want happy customers, placing all their available business with them. They want healthy recurring revenues to help increase the value of their businesses.

Jola won Best White Label Solution and received a Highly Commended certificate for Wholesaler of the Year at the Comms Business Awards in London last week.

The judges shortlisted 94 entries from over 160 submitted from well-known channel businesses such as Giacom and Virgin Media Business Wholesale. To win such a prestigious white-label award demonstrates the strength of the Jola channel proposition.

Cherie Howlett Jola’s CMO, commented, “We are delighted to win two awards and to sponsor the Best ICT Solution. It is a fantastic achievement and I would like to thank our suppliers, partners and wonderful team for their continued support and dedication. Craig Charles was a great host and we had a brilliant evening celebrating.”

Cherie Howlett, one of Jola’s founding members and Chief Marketing Officer, completed the Race for Life in Derby with her daughter Bella, aged 10. They wanted to raise money for Cancer Research to prevent other families from losing their loved ones to this terrible disease. 

“We lost my Dad and Bella’s Grandad to a rare form of cancer in October 2020 and Bella wanted to help Cancer Research fund new innovative treatments to help more people survive. Neither of us likes running, so we trained with the Couch to 5K app to get fit to face the challenge. We raised over £800 as a pair and over £250K as a group! Thank you to everyone for your generous donations, the support we received for this has been amazing. Thank you!” Cherie, Howlett, CMO, Jola.

In the annual partner satisfaction survey, Jola scored a Net Promoter Score of 55, categorising the company as ‘great’, with 44% of Jola partners giving them 10/10 and 95% scoring them 7 or higher. In the comments, Jola partners praised Jola’s products, pricing, portals, people and service.

Adrian Sunderland, Jola’s CEO, commented, ‘I am happy with our NPS score and the feedback we received from partners. We have over 1400 resellers choosing Jola as their preferred mobile connectivity supplier. Our relentless product development continues with a list of unique products you can’t buy from anyone else designed to help partners differentiate and win bigger deals. We continue to grow and invest in people, products, platforms and processes. We have a fantastic team dedicated to supporting our growing partner base and it was great to see so many of them named in the survey.”

Split Licences

The move to split licenses will have an impact on the channel. A greater choice presents both opportunity and the potential for confusion in the channel. More time will be spent choosing the right options for each customer and new documentation will be required. On the flip side, this could make the market more competitive. The unbundling of licences will create price rises for some customers, which may lead to new opportunities as customers shop around for the best deals.

Opportunities

Microsoft Teams continues to provide opportunities for resellers and MSPs. End users benefit from using Teams as a phone system and collaboration tool. Using one app makes life simple. It’s quick to roll out and allows users to work from anywhere.

Certifications

Microsoft certifications have two main advantages for resellers. Firstly, they demonstrate knowledge of the product set, key features and benefits for a wide range of customer requirements. Secondly, they ensure the development of in-house skills required to maintain complex customer solutions.

That said, automation is driving that minimum requirement down and enabling more resellers to support customers in easily deployable solutions. This drives down the cost of providing those services, benefitting the channel in terms of margin, and end-customers in value for money.

Adrian Sunderland, CEO of Jola, announces another senior appointment. Joseph Kirk is promoted to Chief Architect reporting directly to him.

Joseph will be responsible for software architecture, strategy, and development.  He has been with Jola for over 10 years holding several key positions, most recently as Software Development Manager.  He has driven innovation, improved systems and enhanced user experience.

Joseph commented, “I look forward to managing and developing our cloud infrastructure and software to meet partner requirements, now and in the future."

Adrian Sunderland, Jola’s CEO, commented “Both Robustel and ZoHo have recognised Joseph for driving innovation. I have worked with him for many years. I am confident in his ability to deliver unique solutions, which are easy to manage, save customers money and generate healthy recurring margins for our partners.”