COMMS DEALER ROUND TABLE Education is key in the ma


Eclipse and Comms Dealer have been working together to establish what SMEs want from cloud and hosted services. The results of that research and the potential of subscription based models were debated by a group of channel players at our latest round table gathering.


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clipse Head of Sales & Marketing Pete Tomlinson, a key driver of the six week


research programme, put the thought processes in motion by emphasising the premise of the research, namely the increasing customer acceptance of sharing and subscription models. “There is a whole change in buying behaviour coming through from a consumer level. If you think about something as simple as a DVD; people are not buying them or renting them from Blockbuster they are taking a subscription service with Netflix. Some people are even saying they are happy not owning a car preferring to share and pay per use. We were looking at how we, as a well-respected ISP operating in an SME market, can move to a broader organisation, building on the strength of our service model and the strength of our customer experience.”


Eclipse invited over 20 of its customers to an insight day at BT Tower in London to share what excited them about the future world and the barriers to adoption of Cloud based services and Comms Dealer round table facilitator Paul Cunningham, who assisted at that event, outline the five key issues that came to the surface. “The first was connectivity


– people still regard it as a lottery sometimes; the second was complexity – just make it work was the overriding message; the third was migration – people wanted to know that if they experimented with cloud services did they have transferability and also was there a route out if it didn’t work for them?; the fourth and fifth messages were more philosophical namely education – customers wanted to understand the value benefits; and what were the real business outcomes – not technology for the sake of technology.”


Growth potential Taking up the education issue, Joel Bramwell, Business Development Director at Worksmart Solutions had a positive view: “The hosted market is still quite young but there’s a lot of potential out there. With the work we have done with Mitel over the last few years we believe we have got it nailed but education is a constant for us. We understand the pitfalls and we aim to be as transparent as possible with our customers. And it’s a two way street; people are quite clear what they do want and what they don’t want. Knowledge is key but there is a lot to be said for working in partnership with your customers.”


David Hughes Managing Director at Incom, concurred to a degree: “Our role is training to an extent, but also to put the infrastructure in place to help our clients communicate easier. If my clients want to make a call on their iPhone they are not bothered what network it goes over or how it’s routed as long as it gets connected and is of decent enough quality. Do our customers want us to train them on setting it all up? No, they want it to work and if it doesn’t they want to ring somebody up and say fix it.”


James Pink, Managing Director of Pink Connect, agreed: “Our experience has shown that no one wants to hear one more second of information about how to work technology just to get their job done. Only geeks are really interested. How many managers really know the ins and outs of even Windows?”


John Donohoe, a consultant for service provider Blizzard Voice & Data and a director of channel training firm Believe took a polarised view. We have got to get real here. If you understood how to use things like MS Lync or CRM platforms you could drive your firm to greater efficiencies. If you really understood those and


Pete Tomlinson


There is a gap in knowledge and understanding that as an industry we have an opportunity to plug


you could deploy those to your people at desk level you could achieve more. Most staff at the ordinary level never get proper training to get the best out of the software on the desktop, the handset they use every day, the softphone that may reside on their tablet, smartphone or laptop. Staff are not trained properly to get the best out of investments.”


Clodagh Murphy, Managing Director of Eclipse, said the education argument should present opportunity not problems. “The 20 customers


who attended our customer insight day were diverse in type and size. Each said they didn’t know what services were available, and more importantly they didn’t understand the business benefits of these services and how they could help them grow their businesses. I think there is a gap in knowledge and understanding that as an industry we have an opportunity to plug. We can help people grow their businesses.”


Picking up on the connectivity issue, Pink said he had now gone down the satellite


To learn more go to: http://www.eclipse.net.uk/landing/selling-the-cloud 38 COMMS DEALER AUGUST 2012 www.comms-dealer.com


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