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2017 Directory
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Channel
Vision
BEC Focuses on Wireless
Opportunities
By
Tara
Seals
PROFILE
BEC Technologies, a hardware
manufacturer that boasts 43 years
in business specifically in the North
American market, has seen double-
digit growth during the last six
years. The company has seen new
markets to go after, has hired new
talent and has debuted several new
products. Its channel opportunities,
however, are especially rife in the 4G
wireless space.
“BEC is a larger company than
just wireless, and we do DSL, GPON
and fiber too. But wireless is where
the growth is,” said D’Andre Ladson,
director of product marketing at BEC.
“A lot of the applications that resonate
with the channel are in this arena,
including business continuity and
failover from wireline.”
Back-up for a retail point of
sale (PoS) presence is important to
many businesses today, for instance.
Outages cause a loss of business and
loyalty, and, if they last long enough,
can put a small- or medium-sized
organization out of business entirely.
In one example, a campground
in Fort Worth came to BEC after
an outage. The property hosts a
restaurant, sells apparel and offers
Internet services, so it relies heavily
on a retail PoS for its income. But its
biggest weekend source of revenue
revolves around selling commercial
fishing licenses during the season.
“They were served by a cable ISP
and had an outage, and it took three
days over a lucrative weekend to fix,”
Ladson said. “They lost $20,000 in
missed sales. So we were asked to
provide a failover strategy.”
He added that BEC’s platforms
also include management capabilities,
including notifications and reports,
to monitor the primary connection
and, when failovers happen, allow
businesses to avoid overages.
Another big opportunity is in what
Ladson calls “first-day Internet.”
“To get the fastest speeds, you
need to do that over wireline, and a
lot of people are doing fiber,” said
Ladson. “Typically, however, it takes
30 to 90 days to get that installed in
a business location, so a business may
be left without Internet services. With
first-day Internet, you can put in our
product and the business can be up
and running that day.”
There are other opportunities as
well. At the recent WISPAPALOOZA
show, BEC announced support of
LTE Advanced across its LTE product
portfolio. LTE Advanced technologies
such as carrier aggregation, Cat 6
UE support and higher-order MIMO,
all continue the evolution of LTE
toward higher peak data rates, lower
latency and more capacity that can
better address campus requirements.
There’s also the MX-Connect Series
of LTE machine-to-machine and
Internet of things (M2M/IoT) device
platforms, which support a wide range
of applications and vertical market
segments. This includes smart city
scenarios for applications such as
using LTE devices for remote video
surveillance or for automatic license
plate recognition.
“We’re moving to a wireless world,”
Ladson said. “There’s a whole M2M
and IoT trend – devices are being
connected at a rapid clip, and there
are more and more applications and
devices coming out to support some
of those services. There are so many
verticals that we can fit into, including
oil, gas and energy, and smart city.
So for us, our products have the
capability of supporting multiple
markets across many verticals. We
help our partners in figuring out how
to tackle those opportunities.”
BEC’s partner strategy, as a
hardware manufacturer, is to sign up
service providers and other channel
partners to sell BEC’s platforms
alongside their other offerings, such
as a managed IP service. It provides
a range of support aspects, including
market development funds, training,
not-for-resale demo equipment and
hands-on customer service.
“We participate in the sale and
go out to the site, with the goal
of educating that partner on the
applications we support and how
to use them to bring in incremental
revenue, like a cloud platform for
device management,” Ladson said.
BEC started out working with Tier
2 and Tier 3 regional rural carriers,
which Ladson said has informed its
partner support efforts.
“Rural carriers don’t have a staff
of folks with segregated duties. You
can have the owner of the company
going out to install CPE products. So
there’s a lot more support required in
terms of being there for some of the
first line conversations. Our support
staff is really strong, because it was
built for some of those early customer
needs. We’ve even flown out to assist
troubleshooting in real time and in
doing propagation studies. We’re here
to help our partners make the most of
the wireless revolution.”