Automating broadband
Griffin was the first to completely automate the ordering, provisioning and management of broadband creating the ‘ISP in a box’ and enabling resellers to get into a market they could not enter profitably with manual systems. We were also able to make reasonable profits by managing broadband traffic efficiently and balancing high users with low users.
Broadband profits
With broadband the network is shared between users and two seemingly identical services can yield significantly different profits. For example a company paying £20 a month for broadband used only for email probably generates £12 of profit vs the average of say £5. By managing heavy users and running the network efficiently, ISPs can use contention to push up average margins.
Ethernet
In the UK most Ethernet is sold uncontended. This means that if you pay for 20Mbs then that’s what you get and when you’re not using it aggregators cannot sell the capacity to someone else, which is effectively what they did with broadband to maximise capacity and boost margins. Many carriers have piled into the Ethernet leased line market with seemingly undifferentiated offerings. This has quickly commoditised the product and because it has happened so quickly nobody has really given much thought to the automation of the quoting and delivery processes.
Adding value
Aggregators that have something to offer besides pure connectivity, can build complex WANs or bundle minutes and cloud services, will survive but at much lower margins and market valuations. The carriers will do with Ethernet what they have been trying to do for years with broadband which is to ‘dis-intermediate’ the market selling direct to resellers and cutting out the aggregators. Smart resellers will focus on making everything easy and predictable by using software to automate quoting, provisioning and network management.
Jola offers the channel the best prices for the most suitable products to meet their customers' needs in minutes. We add real value in key areas and our Partners simply win more of the orders that they pitch for because they work with us. This is why we have signed more than 50 channel partners in less than six months. Since we launched our automated quote tool last month more than 100 dealers and resellers have registered to use it.
