Master agency Telcombrokers is rebranding as Telecom Brokers, opening a new chapter in its history after 15 years in the industry. A name change, a new logo and a redesigned Web site will go with a 2013 focus on expanding its customer and agent base nationwide, as well as enhancing its cloud and hosted services business.
Telecom Brokers is looking to grow its presence on a national level, it said, following a revenue increase that saw an extra million dollars in commissions payouts in 2012, founder and CEO Dominic Antonini explained.
“2012 saw impressive growth in our business, and now we are focusing that success from last year with a relaunch and an expansion our advertising and marketing to a national level, adding more trade shows to the roster and actively recruiting additional agents,” he noted.
The enhanced focus on cloud services is part of the expansion as well. “We started out more than a decade ago focused on two lines of business—the CLEC business and long distance,” said Antonini. “That has obviously expanded over time, and with the advent of cloud, our agents have a huge opportunity to tap a whole new segment of revenue.”
Cloud-delivered IT services offer agents a way to capture a portion of the money that end-users once spent on servers and in-house, he explained. “In the past, only about 20% of companies’ tech spending was spent on telecom and services,” Antonini said. “Now that businesses are embracing the cloud, we gain exposure to 65% of the budget because companies are now avoiding buying servers and on-premise equipment in favor of having those resources delivered as a service. This significantly opens the market up as far as a percentage of the spend that an agent can capture today.”
The focus on the cloud is an intrinsic part of the company’s rebranding effort. “This year, as we rebrand the company and launch our new Website presence, one of our front-and-center initiatives is cloud, with a renewed commitment to enabling agents to successfully incorporate this new way of doing business into their models,” explained Nancy Ridge, vice president at Telecom Brokers.
For agents, that means adding cloud and hosted services to their existing business initiatives, not overhauling their traditional approach, she explained. “Our new logo suggests the interaction and interface of cloud, data, MPLS and point-to-point Internet access, along with voice (which we still see as being a very strong part of our industry), and a relationship piece woven in,” Ridge said. “Our goal for agents is to have them see the integration of cloud delivery as part of what they’re already doing, as opposed to seeing it as a new line of business. This is just another strategy to add to the equation when building a custom solution for customers.”
To bolster that philosophy, the new website is geared towards collaboration and creating a dialog around the market opportunities instead of only taking a product-centric view, she added. “Our attitude is that we need to use the resources that we have, like network information and relationships—to start the conversation,” Ridge said. “Working together and having an open door to brainstorming and conversation is a key to success as the services landscape becomes more complex.”
“Our goal with the site was to reflect the industry as a whole,” explained Travis Ishida, president of Telecom Brokers’ marketing firm, Oncore Marketing, which handled the redesign. “We wanted to refresh the online presence with a streamlined, media-rich look that reflects who Telecom Brokers is as a company, and which showcases its underlying philosophy of collaboration for success, and having fun in what they do.”
In 2013, the company also will be exhibiting at a variety of industry events, including Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, Interop in Las Vegas, Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Cisco Live in Orlando and Channel Partners in Las Vegas.
Taken together, the company’s 2013 refresh promises to usher in still more growth. “We have a new name, a new tagline, new office and Website, and a new focus,” said Antonini. “We could not be more excited to see what the year has in store for us and our agents.”
