Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Strength and depth of management

A good way to attract and keep the best individuals at the head of an organisation is to share ownership. Investors like a strong leader supported by expertise in key areas. As the business grows, external investment is a good way for shareholders to de-risk, and ensure the future growth of the company.

Recurring revenues

Subscription models, preferably on long term contracts, are more valuable than once-off project fees. They protect the business in a down-turn and provide a solid base to grow the business, and scale the establishment required to support it.

Cash collection and cash flow

Companies with a high percentage of customers paying via Direct Debit are more valuable. Working capital is more predictable and finance costs, including debt collecting, are minimised. Operate a rolling cash flow forecast and focus on converting as much of the profits into cash. The ability of the business to generate cash is a primary driver when investors are valuing the business.

Product Development

Companies that develop their own unique products and are first to market with new innovations demonstrate value. An efficient and agile product development process demonstrates long term value, especially in extremely competitive markets.

Great sales and marketing

Great sales and marketing strategies and teams are essential to building a strong business model. You must have a process for recruiting, retaining and developing staff as the business grows. Sales and marketing teams that work together by design demonstrate strong management. By building a large, strong, loyal and diverse customer base, you minimise the risk of the business’s reliance on top customers and verticals.

Working from home in our sector has been widely recognised as a success. 100 days in though, how are your employees holding up?

At the start of lock-down, working from home was a novelty for some. They enjoyed their home comforts, without missing a meeting, ticket or phone call. Employers were quick to provide headsets, chairs, screens etc. to make working from the kitchen table or spare room, easier. Companies organised weekly quizzes, checked in regularly with Teams calls and sent little gifts to reward and encourage their staff.

As many of us continue to work from home, and some companies consider making it a more permanent arrangement, do we as employers need to do more, to ensure the health and happiness of our employees?

Companies like Perkbox and Vitality offer employee wellbeing programmes, which include; exclusive free online fitness programmes, free online GP, day and night appointments, same-day prescriptions, perks and discounts, as well as 24/7 emotional support.

Employee Assistance Provider (EAP) Programmes provide articles, newsletters and webinars, on topics such as anxiety, depression, debt management, legal issues, bereavements, relationships and childcare. A 24-hour confidential helpline is provided to all employees to get immediate support and counselling.

Programmes such as these help to recognise and reward staff with online vouchers, but also support physical and emotional wellbeing. They allow you to track the happiness of your workforce, as well as gathering feedback on what could be done to improve motivation and results.

SMEs no longer have to worry about going over their monthly data allowances and getting big monthly bills containing data overage charges, as unlimited data packages are now available. Resellers won’t have customers complaining about overage bills and risk losing them to the competition.

Use Cases

Unlimited data SIMs are being used in 4G routers to provide fast, reliable internet connectivity to homeworkers. They are also used in 4G devices for primary and secondary connectivity.

Wholesale Options

The first thing resellers need to look at when signing up with suppliers for unlimited data packages are the terms and conditions. Are the SIMs fit for purpose? Are they designed to be used permanently in routers? Are they available without speed restrictions? Are they available on short-term contracts? Can they be easily ordered, provisioned, managed and billed? How much margin can be made on these packages?  

Jola

Jola is an award-winning, channel-only supplier of business communications, specialising in unlimited data SIMs. We have over 700 partners including global MSPs, CSPs, ISPs, Systems Integrators, Telecommunications resellers, IT Resellers, and IoT vertical specialist. 96% of partners would recommend us. In a recent partner satisfaction survey, Jola scored a Net Promoter Score of 61, which categorises the company as ‘great’. Our unlimited data SIMs are available on Vodafone and O2 networks. We offer a range of contracts from 30-days to 24 months. Our tariffs support 5G subject to device compatibility and network coverage.

Resellers have been supporting care homes by providing smart devices used by both residents and care workers to raise alarms and track the health of the residents. They have also been installing CCTV cameras to increase security and video telephony solutions to facilitate contact with family members.

The challenge care homes face with 4G data is the lack of visibility and control. They manage an estate of 4G devices and SIM contracts, but cannot monitor and track usage, which results in monthly data overage charges.

Specialists are partnering with Jola to provide solutions which include Jola data-only SIM cards, which can be aggregated and monitored within Mobile Manager. This means that usage can be spread across the estate with heavy-use devices taking the un-used data allowances of lower-use devices.

As many more businesses plan their openings, the channel prepares to support their changing IT and telephony requirements. For many, Microsoft Teams has been a great tool for video calls, group meetings and collaboration during lockdown. Some are now considering adding a calling plan to be able to talk with people outside of Teams.

One stumbling block some employees find is the move away from handsets. They are used to handsets on their desks, they hold their frequently dialled numbers and are plug and play so can be used at home or in the office.

Direct Routing

Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams offers much more than the standard Microsoft Calling Plans. Jola’s Direct Routing offering offers numbers in 167 countries and every area code in the UK. It comes with free UK calls, competitive international call bundles and unlimited in-country local call packages.

We are the first Direct Routing supplier to offer handsets, certified for Microsoft Teams. The new handsets are cost-effective, with multi-touch screens and HD audio. They are also compatible with Bluetooth headsets. 

As businesses return to work, we think Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams users could be a great opportunity for the channel to increase ARPU and win new business.

4G back-up is not a new idea for ISPs. It makes sense to have a product that guarantees some form of internet connectivity when the primary circuit fails. The challenge has been the cost. If the service is not used, they are often still charged for the data allowance and if it is used, they are charged an exorbitant overage fee.

Jola is the first MVNO to launch a true Layer 2 product, designed specifically to meet the bespoke needs of UK ISPs, with no modifications to their edge network.

Mobile L2TP gives the ISP full control over routing and IP addressing, facilitating the creation of fixed-line failover, pre-ethernet and stand-alone internet access services. Mobile L2TP gives ISPs access to all four UK mobile networks and 450 networks globally.

ISPs can now interconnect at Layer 2 directly into the Jola eSIM MVNO platform in London (or any other AWS connected location in the world) – with the option of failover to a secondary location for the delivery of resilient services. The solution is inexpensive, reliable and straightforward to set-up. With un-steered multi-network eSIMs, ISPs are not tied to any particular network and no longer need to do a site survey to determine the best signal globally.

With the popularity of Teams during lock-down, Direct Routing has really taken off. Many new suppliers have entered the market and resellers are selling it as a great opportunity to expand their telecoms portfolio and win some lucrative new business. The challenge many face however is the provisioning. It’s not straightforward and even with Microsoft qualified engineers and extensive Microsoft PowerShell or S4B knowledge, many have struggled until now.

Jola has a good track record with portals. Our ethos is to make it easy for the channel to sell, provision, bill and manage telecoms services. We understand how much margin the channel needs to make on these products and how competitive the market is. We know that needing specialist engineers in-house will put-off many resellers and our solution is fully automated provisioning on our SIP management portal.

Our unique Direct Routing proposition provides partners with unlimited UK calls, competitive out-of-bundle rates, international call packages and in-country calling packages in 30 countries.

Our Automated Configuration for Direct Routing is based on best-practice and doesn’t require partners to provide Office 365 credentials. It gives all resellers the opportunity to sell, provision and manage Direct Routing within a self-serve portal, without the need for specialist knowledge, skills or software.

Lockdown has been a testing time for many channel businesses, but is there anything we can learn from it?

We can work from anywhere with a good internet connection

We were ready to work from home ‘en masse’ as our phone systems, software and files were in the cloud and we were already using collaborative software, such as Microsoft Teams. Moving to a work-from-home model did not present many challenges, as many of us were already spending part of our week working remotely. Employees were able to answer calls and tickets from their kitchen tables and make offices in box rooms very easily. We were able to order and deliver additional equipment, such as headsets and office chairs to the homes of our employees.

We embraced technology

Even though we had the technology, face-to-face meetings were always preferable, and meetings booked rather than webinars or video calls. This all changed during lock-down. It is now acceptable to video call colleagues at home and arrange video conference calls and webinars with customers. We are now much more accepting of background noise and interruptions than we were pre-lock down, as we have a better understanding of the challenges our employees and customers are facing.

We got creative

With many projects being put on hold and events cancelled, we needed to rethink our sales and marketing strategies. Many of us enhanced our online offering, making it easier for our customers to place orders online. We re-thought our marketing messages and our sales strategies and began building relationships online using LinkedIn, Twitter and IM. As we couldn’t interact face-to-face, we had more time to comment on blogs, like posts, answer LinkedIn messages and get around to those projects we had been putting off. We changed our recruitment policies and hired new people without ever meeting them face-to-face.

We listened

We listened to our staff and the challenges they were facing balancing work with their homelives and created support programmes. We arranged quizzes and online socials. We rolled out access to online workouts and confidential help lines and encouraged regular breaks and flexible working. We provided vouchers to access the latest films for free and discount vouchers for online shopping.

We tried to help

We have access to technology to allow people to communicate and were watching on the news how doctors were struggling to see patients, students were unable to study from home and family members were worrying about relatives in care homes. We contacted our local surgeries, schools and care homes and offered to help. As an industry we were able to quickly provide the technology to solve these problems.

We have more listening and learning to do to allow us to diversify and grow our businesses. The crisis will end, and we will look back on this period and the lessons learnt. Those that adapted quickly and prepared for future may turn out to be the most successful.

Devices in buses, coaches, lorries and trains both in the UK and abroad, require seamless Internet connectivity on the move. In some scenarios, customers cannot predict which countries their devices will be travelling to and can only estimate usage required. In others, customers have a clear idea of requirements.

For both scenarios and everything in-between, there is good solution. The challenge resellers have is searching the market to get exactly the right fit for each opportunity.

Solutions

A global eSIM will allow you to connect devices to the Internet in any country where it is being used. eSIMs can be embedded into devices or delivered as a traditional plastic SIM. Instead of swapping plastic SIM cards, profiles are downloaded and managed on a device as needed. In the eSIM model, a device is ready to deploy anywhere network coverage exists. eSIMs are very cost-effective.

M2M Roaming SIMs also allow devices to connect to the internet in specific countries, however, they may need to be swapped out in the future if the customer switches to a different network offering. They offer exceptional reliability and coverage and are easy to manage and inexpensive to buy.

Wholesale Comparison Tool

The Jola Tariff Tool allows resellers to compare the market to get the best wholesale, roaming SIM package, comparing hundreds of countries and networks instantly. It is now available on the Jola Partner Portal Mobile App.

Simply:

• Select the countries you need the SIM to work in
• Choose monthly data allowance required 
• Compare available packages
• View lists of 3G and 4G mobile networks in each country, your SIM package will roam on

For the last few weeks many of us have been working from home. What do we need to consider now to ensure a safe office environment for our employees in the near future?

If it aint broke….

If your team is working successfully from home, there may be no need to move back into the office for the moment. With many schoolchildren still at home, it would be difficult for many working parents to return to the office at this time. At some point in the future however, employees may need to return to the office, so it is worth considering these points.

Step 1 – Ensuring the health of your workforce

Communicate the latest government guidelines to ensure that anyone with symptoms or anyone that has been in contact with a person testing positive for COVID 19, self-isolates for 14 days. Do you wish to issue each employee with a PPE pack containing essential items such as hand sanitiser, single-use masks, single-use gloves, blue roll, laptop and screen cleaning spray and surface cleansing spray?

Step 2 – Maintaining social distancing guidelines

You may need to look at your office plan. Are your desks 2 meters apart? Do you have adequate dividers? Do you need floor or wall signage to remind employees of the safe distance? Signs on the doors to remind people not to hold them open for others.

Step 3 – Maintaining a COVID free environment

You may need to look at your cleaning schedule to ensure regular cleaning of communal areas and ensure individuals each clean their desks, screens, keyboard, mice, trackpads, kettles, fridges, light switches, door handles etc. You may need to provide sanitisation stations where cleaning sprays and blue paper are provided for single-use wipe downs.

Step 4 – Socially Distanced Meetings

Can you continue to hold meetings virtually? If not think about limiting the number of people in a meeting room to ensure the 2-meter rule and consider wearing masks.

Step 5 – Socially Distanced Breaks

Consider break out areas and toilets. You may need additional signage, cleaning stations and processes to ensure surfaced are wiped clean before and after usage and that employees remain 2 meters apart. I know it sounds a lot, but you may need to ban tea rounds and ensure each person only uses their own cup, spoon and milk. If your whole team is touching the kettle and the milk bottle, there is an increased risk. Same issue with the bins, unless they are pedal bins.

Step 6 – New Rules

You may consider introducing new policies such as staggered arrival times and break times to reduce the amount of people in communal areas, such as the car park and break out rooms at the same time. You will need to ensure no sharing of IT equipment or stationery, so that everyone is allocated their own. You may need to add a sign to the microwave to ensure it is wiped down before and after use and ensure people use their own plates, knives, forks and cutlery. Most importantly you must ensure that you have a good stock of handwash and cleaning equipment to ensure staff can work effectively in their own bubble in a clean and healthy environment.

Most companies will conduct a risk assessment and implement policies and communicate them to all staff before embarking on a return to work project.