Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

With technologies being switched off (PSTN, ISDN, 3G) and the current economic climate, demand for cost-effective, managed mobile data solutions from the Channel, has never been so high.

Hotels and care homes are replacing single phone lines with managed 4G solutions and other single PSTN applications like lifts, alarm lines and door entry systems are following suit. There is a need for secure pre-configured 4G routers for digital signage, temporary WiFi for construction sites and fixed IP SIMs for CCTV cameras. Multi-Net SIMs are required for ANPR cameras, wearables and tracking devices. 3G SIMs in thousands of devices from fixed line backup to street signs need to be replaced.

The list goes on, and the opportunity for the channel is massive. The challenge is finding the opportunities each partner can win and to do this Jola has come up with a unique process called The Mobile Data Revenue Generator™.

Jola is helping channel partners uncover prospects with immediate requirements for mobile data SIMs. We help develop unique solutions that partners can't buy from anyone else, at a competitive price and healthy margin. We are channel-only so partners can trust us to help them pitch and close deals. We are on hand to support partners and their customers throughout the buying process and we can help create winning propositions, producing large, high-margin long-term contracts.

The cost-of-living crisis is having an impact. Employees are worried about putting on their heating when working from home, and the rising costs of fuel travelling to the office. Many businesses are worried about how they will carry on with much higher energy bills. 

However, in a crisis, there is also opportunity. The opportunity for employers to react to challenges faced by employees by offering cycle-to-work schemes and cost-of-living bonuses. 

Demand for products such as mobile data is increasing as companies look to implement technology as a way of cutting costs. For example, councils are implementing smart street lighting and smart bin collections. 

Demand for smart meters is high, which creates mobile data opportunities for trusted channel partners to provide and manage. As companies look to cut costs, smart device-as-a-service solutions become more attractive with no upfront hardware costs and the ability to upgrade or switch devices as required. 

Jola has run a successful apprenticeship scheme for many years, allowing us to educate our new recruits on the needs of Jola partners and our unique products. Our team enjoy introducing new people to the channel, with a passion for customer service and developing their skills and experience.

At Jola, we look to match new roles to available courses in each department. We work with a specialist agency that helps us to recruit the right candidates for our roles and supports our apprentices to complete their training courses. The blend of obtaining educational qualifications at the same time as learning on the job works well for us.

Jola has worked with three different apprenticeship training providers over the years. Each one has offered end-to-end support from recruitment, and training through to successful course completion.  Courses are made accessible using a mix of online and face-to-face tutoring as well as on-the-job training and projects.

The courses provide an understanding of important concepts, which our apprentices use and incorporate into our business. The apprenticeship schemes help the whole company to evolve in a positive way.

Jola has been fortunate to retain most apprentices beyond their programme. A successful Technical Support apprentice went on to be employed by Jola as a Network Engineer, further developing their skills.

One of our school leavers successfully qualified at level 4 of the scheme. They are now the go-to person for all our current apprentices, assisting with project work.

Telephone lines as we know them will not exist in a few years’ time and millions of end users will need to decide what to do with their existing phone numbers. Jola has come up with a free white-label application that resellers can use with their customers to forward calls from landlines to mobiles or to add landline numbers to mobile data SIMs.

Jola operates both a mobile data network and a SIP network and has developed an innovative application that partners can re-brand. CloudNumber is available to download free from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Instead of having to use an analogue phone or Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA), CloudNumber allows users to connect to Jola’s PSTN replacement services via their mobile phone. Experts in number porting, Jola can facilitate the porting of both landline and mobile numbers. Jola partners have the choice of ordering new numbers or easily porting customers’ landline numbers, who can carry on making and receiving calls, without the need for any additional hardware.

There are millions of individual PSTN lines in the UK that are soon to be end-of-life. Upgrading to broadband is an expensive overkill solution and can come with significant upfront costs.

Jola is in a unique position as the sole channel-only provider of both mobile data & SIP and has put together a webinar which focuses on PSTN Replacement Toolkits with multiple solutions for every requirement.

A record number of participants have signed up for the webinar. With the PSTN switch-off looming, the channel is looking for cost-effective solutions they can sell, deliver and control with ease.

Jola has created zero-CapEx hardware rental packages for single PSTN lines supporting phone calls, alarms, EPOS machines, door entry systems, CCTV, lift lines and calling kiosks, among many others. 

‘Resellers can replace common PSTN solutions at a really competitive price, managing operations and usage within Mobile Manager. End-users can retain their existing numbers and choose their preferred SIP Overlay solution with additional options such as voicemail and call recording.” Lee Broxson, CSO, Jola.

What are the benefits to businesses of a strong female presence in boardrooms?

According to Deloitte, gender diversity in UK board rooms is lagging behind European counterparts with only 1 in 5 board room seats held by women. I sat on the board at Jola for over eight years and was the only female board member. Being a female on the board sends a positive message to other females in the organisation that there is not a glass ceiling and it is possible to progress to more senior positions within the organisation. If you can see someone similar to yourself doing the job you want in the future, it makes the goal seem more achievable and you can often gain a mentor to help you learn the skills to be able to get there. I like to think that I brought a new dimension to the team and some complementary skills. Board discussions were always inclusive and a female marketing perspective from a detail-orientated person was often useful in decision-making. The Jola Board has learned that it’s not enough to have female representation you have to make sure decisions are not made without everyone’s input.

How are you taking a lead on the issue of increasing female representation at the top in your business?

At Jola, we focus on hiring and developing the skills we need to satisfy the demands of our partners. We use our own technologies in-house to facilitate flexible working and run training and development programmes, which has helped us to recruit more women into management positions within the organisation.

I have championed a few different initiatives to remove the barriers some women face working in the channel such as work-from-anywhere and part-time hours. This has facilitated Mums working from home, doing school drop-off and pick-ups, attending parents' evenings, school productions, sports days and taking kids to after-school clubs. It has also allowed Mums to be at home to look after ill children and relatives globally, whilst being completely focussed on the needs of Jola, our sales team and our partners’ requirements during working hours.

We have introduced fantastic EMI schemes and employee benefits to compete with much larger organisations offering the same flexible working and gender-diverse culture locally.

We changed the way we recruited to remove the barriers of very specific qualifications and experience and focussed on finding smart people who share the same values as the Jola team and who are looking to grow and develop with us.

We are supported by entrepreneurs who have given us a voice at every level of the organisation and a career path to progress. We introduced work experience schemes, apprenticeship schemes, sandwich year placement schemes, graduate training schemes, and we advertised roles internally so women could progress inter-departmentally. We encourage and pay for our staff to gain qualifications to progress within Jola.

We have official training and development programmes as well as unofficial mentoring programmes. We encourage networking and personal development sessions with organisations such as Reframe, Women in Tech.

What initiatives and developments do you participate in to help increase the presence of women on boards in the wider industry?

I actively contribute to industry magazines and attend events speaking on panels discussing diversity and inclusion.

What are the objectives of these efforts and how are the initiatives being progressed? 

My objective is to raise awareness, inspire and to demonstrate how small changes can make such a big difference to the quality of female candidates being recruited and the success of organisations in the channel.

What more action needs to be taken to boost the number of women on boards?

I don’t think there is a quick fix. We need to increase the number of experienced candidates to recruit from. The more we can influence young people to reach their potential, the better the recruitment pool will be for us when they are ready to start work. We could go into schools and talk about the careers we can offer in IT and Telecoms and get them excited about learning new skills. We can offer work experience programmes, apprenticeship schemes, mentoring schemes, re-training schemes, back-to-work schemes and graduate schemes to grow our own talent internally and offer career development and share schemes. If you are on the board you often own a stake in the company and to do this you need to be able to invest. This is a barrier in itself. I was lucky enough to be part of a start-up with seed money, of which my share was a percentage I was able to invest.

What barriers have you identified to having more women on boards and how is Jola addressing these challenges?

To recruit the best talent into the industry we need to look at barriers. Do our daughters want to become board members in IT and Telecoms? My daughter did want to be a YouTuber or an actress but has recently said she may start her own business and aims to be CEO. She is more aware of what we do as she spent so much time sharing my home office being home-schooled.

Jola addresses some of these challenges because we need to grow our own talent internally. We are not specifically focused on hiring more women, in fact, we are against positive discrimination. If board positions are recruited for, the pool we recruit from needs to be more diverse and to do this we need more experienced women with great track records in previous board positions, who can add something extra to the existing board.

What cultural considerations need to be taken into account and why?

If you have children, someone needs to look after them. If I look at the school gates 97% of the parents doing the pickup and drop-offs are women. If you don’t have children it may be more of a level playing field. Do we then need to look at job descriptions for potential board members to see what they are looking for and work backwards? Do we have the connections and network to be recommended for openings? Do we have the track record and experience required? If not, we need to build that and work with brilliant entrepreneurs who can help us achieve our goals.

There are millions of individual PSTN lines in the UK that are soon to be end-of-life. Upgrading to broadband is an expensive overkill solution and can come with significant upfront costs.

Jola has solved this problem for resellers and their customers by creating zero-CapEx mobile data rental packages for single PSTN lines serving phone calls, alarms, EPOS machines, door entry systems, CCTV, faxes, lift lines and calling kiosks, among many others.

We have a wide range of DaaS (Device-as-a-Service) bundles which include the router, the SIM card, the SIP Trunk, porting, ATA and airtime. There are no upfront costs and in-term devices can be upgraded, with faulty equipment getting an advanced replacement as standard.

Resellers can replace common PSTN solutions at a really competitive price, managing operations and usage within Mobile Manager. End-users can retain their existing numbers and choose their preferred SIP Overlay solution with additional options such as voicemail and call recording.

Addresses PSTN replacement need

There are millions of single-call PSTN lines in the UK that are soon to be end-of-life. Upgrading to broadband is expensive and capital costs of converters and 4G routers soon mount up.

Jola has solved this problem for resellers and their customers by providing everything they need, on one affordable monthly rental.

“We have recently added a wide range of Analogue Telephone Adapters to our PSTN Replacement Toolkit ranging from single to 48 port solutions. We also have routers with in-built ATAs as a ‘one box’ solution for those customers that only need a single line. Jola Partners manage each port on their ATAs using our portal. The credentials of their SIP overlay services are auto-configured on the devices. End-users can retain their existing analogue phones and port their numbers, which is great for customers such as hotels and care homes, who don’t want to replace their handsets. Jola ATAs complement our existing portfolio with customers able to plug the ATA into an intelligent 4G router and use Jola mobile connectivity to deliver the SIP service. The Device as a Service model is becoming increasingly popular because there are no up-front costs and the device is guaranteed for the duration of the contract” Lee Broxson, CSO, Jola.

Following the acquisition by Wireless Logic, Jola is strengthening its Channel presence with the appointment of Jon Chard as Partner Director.  Jon brings a wealth of Channel knowledge and is a fantastic asset to the Jola Sales Team. 

'‘I’m delighted to have joined the Jola Team, a business that I have held in high regard for several years. Jola is an innovative and forward-thinking business in the channel, and I am looking forward to helping them push towards further growth and continued success.’ Jon commented.

Lee Broxson, Jola CSO added, ‘It’s a pleasure to have Jon joining the team as a Partner Director, he brings with him 17 years of telecoms experience with five of those spent working with Jola at one of our suppliers.  Jon will be managing our larger MSP and ISP partners with a strategic goal to help find and win larger deals within their bases using our unique Mobile-Data Revenue Generator™  (MRG™) process.’

Chard’s appointment enhances the continued expansion of Jola with Oliver Izard, a former sandwich year placement, re-joining Jola as an Internal Account Executive.

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 to 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 of 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 (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.

We have been selling mobile data to the channel since 2014 and we understand the pain points of our partners 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 margin and minimise costs for their customers.