The communications landscape is in a state of wholesale digitization–and an accompanying move to cloud services. This spells huge technology changes for business, and big opportunity for telecom agents, VARs and other partners to take a consultative role with clients.
“Your customers are seeking a trusted technology partner who can identify and explain opportunities to help them succeed in their fast moving industries,” said Ken Mercer, vice president of master agency TBI, in a blog post. “By understanding the latest changes in the technology and telecom landscape, savvy VARs and agents can more effectively engage, pitch and win with their business customers.”
Several impactful changes to the telecom landscape can be used as technology investment talking points with customers, he points out:
- The Fiber Frenzy
The race is on to connect corporate offices, branch offices, data centers, and more to fiber-rich networks that enable faster provisioning of bandwidth than older transmission facilities. While the fiber providers in your customers’ backyard may not necessarily be household names, making the move to a fiber network should be at the top of your customers’ considerations for its scalability, flexibility, and fast-provisioning capability.
- Scalable Bandwidth
Business network demands fluctuate. Your customers need flexible bandwidth that doesn’t take months to provision. Once your customers are connected to fiber, their initial bandwidth can be rapidly raised to handle traffic increases and decreases. Thanks to advanced equipment in the network, a service provider can raise the capacity from say 100 megabits to 900 megabits on a 1 gigabit port, without on-site equipment.
- Getting Connected
For cloud services, ethernet has emerged as the primary interface for access between a customer site and the cloud provider, or between the site and the nearest service provider’s point-of-presence (POP). If your customers are using cloud services (for example Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), service providers that have a direct network-to-network interface (NNI) or (POP) inside that cloud network can offer your customers the best service. By connecting directly to the network you are eliminating the need for a ‘middle-man’ and don’t have to worry about additional service providers.
- Seeing Value in Video
Forward-thinking businesses have begun using video to help expand their brand. Once upon a time the use of video was limited to TV programming in hotels and resorts in the hospitality industry, but businesses across the spectrum are realizing that they can use video to engage their customers in new ways than they have before. The potential for video use has spread far and wide to most any location with a monitor and some form of waiting area, such as doctor’s offices, assisted living facilities, bars and restaurants.
Encourage your customers to start using video to capture the attention of their end users and deliver marketing content to them in new and unique ways. Video is often delivered via triple play over Ethernet so your customers may also consider providing Wi-Fi to their patrons as an added perk and part of their voice-video-internet bundle.
- Content’s Kingdom
If your customers are among the innovative businesses delivering video content in office or online, guide them toward content delivery network services for a high quality and optimized end-user viewing experience. Content delivery network (CDN) pioneers such as Akamai Technologies began addressing overwhelmed web sites and optimizing video delivery well over a decade ago and have since created cloud versions of their offerings, as have some smaller rivals. An increasing number of cloud providers are acquiring these abilities or partnering with other companies to provide them to customers.
- People Savings from the Cloud
The lion’s share of cloud computing pitches focus on the benefits of cost avoidance, technology savings, and the greater ability to compete in a fast-changing business market. These pitches typically forget to include the potential for people savings as well.
By shifting basic and repetitive management tasks from skilled IT staff to a cloud service provider, companies can re-focus their technology experts on projects that directly benefit the company’s overall business strategy.
- What About Wireless?
Many businesses are investing in machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, which connect business assets to wireless sensors. Businesses, especially those looking to streamline and reduce the expense of managing resources such as fleets of vehicles or pipeline networks use the technology to collect and analyze data, and then improve on processes.
“Whether it’s adding new items to your portfolio, pushing new benefits, or finding ways to pitch money savings to decision makers, it’s all about keeping your pulse on the industry and communicating how these changes can benefit your customers not just in the technology department, but in their overall business goals,” Mercer said.
