Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

There are over 5000 scaffolding companies registered in the UK employing over 30,000 people according to IBISWorld’s Scaffolding Services market research report, conducted in December last year. The report suggests market revenues of over £3bn with no companies having a dominent market share. Why are so many switching to hosted voice?

Local IT Support

Many local IT support companies supply cabling and PC support to local SMEs. Typically with several hundred customers, they operate within a couple of hours drive of the office but will go farther afield if required and for the right size job. A lot of their income comes from one-off projects however they have a reasonable base of customers that pay monthly to support their office IT.  Monthly recurring revenues help to grow the business and cover costs between projects.

1. We only offer SIM-only packages.

Jola has the best deal on Vodafone mobile SIMs neatly packaged - RegularSIM, LargeSIM and SuperSIM. We offer unlimited standard UK minutes, unlimited texts and 20GB of 4G data as well as inclusive minutes to non-geographic numbers. We partner with IT support and telecommunications companies with customers looing to break the tethering of airtime and handset contracts.

Fibre broadband is faster than copper broadband but is that the only benefit for your customers?

Access to hosted apps - work remotely as if in the office

Remote workers upgrading to fibre broadband can access useful business applications hosted in the cloud, such as Microsoft Office 365, JolaPhone cloud voice and Xero online accountancy packages. The benefit here is that they can work from home as if they were in the office, making and receiving calls and accessing, editing and saving corporate documents. Team members in the office can even see if their colleagues working from home are online or on the phone before making contact.

There are over 20,000 nursing homes in the UK providing residential care to older people, with an average of 40 residents per home. Qualified nurses provide care to residents, some of whom are eligible for NHS funding with the rest being privately funded.

Quality of care is a primary focus and some nursing homes are introducing IT to help improve communication.

One of Jola's Partners recently installed fibre broadband into a nursing home with four sites in Reading. They replaced the existing phone lines and installed four phones into each site. They also provided staff with tablets loaded with appropriate software to log medical notes. The care homes are now all on one phone system and key nursing staff use their mobiles as a desk extension to make and receive calls on the go.

1. Why upgrade your customers' connectivity?

You are trusted advisers - your customers prefer to buy from you. If you also manage their connectivity you can keep your competitors out and use the faster, more reliable connection to move applications and data into the cloud. You can also increase your recurring revenues, helping you to fund business growth.

Have you ever had a customer ring you up in a panic needing a phone system double quick?

It happens more often that you might think. Moving offices can be as stressful as moving house and with so much to think about telephony often falls through the cracks. Growing businesses with new starters and nowhere to seat them, often need to find premises quickly and be up and running in days. 

IT and telecommunications suppliers

A recent survey by SIR suggested that half of SMEs would talk to their local IT supplier when considering communications purchases however very few of them sell and support the products their customers are interested in. The rest turn to their telecommunications providers who are ahead of the game in many ways already supplying internet connectivity and traditional and hosted telephony.

IT Support companies spend a lot of their time talking to their customers about something that isn't working properly. They work to ensure things don't break and then fix them if they do. The time they spend on site and the importance of IT to their customers means that they are usually trusted more than any other supplier. Surveys have shown that SMEs favour buying cloud-based solutions from suppliers with an IT/data background, however few IT Support companies sell cloud voice or the quality connectivity required to enable it. 

So why should you consider broadening your IP portfolio to include connectivity and VoIP?

1. SIM-only

JolaMobile is a SIM-only service. By not including a handset you get a much better deal - prices start at £9.50 per month.

2. Monthly contracts

By moving to JolaMobile SIMs you can keep all your employees on the same cancellation period - 30 days as Jola offers monthly rolling contracts.