BUSINESS PROFILE Durrant’s virtual journey
Simon Durrant’s appointment as Sales Director of Virtual1 was the culmination of a long career journey with many twists and turns, no calibrated sat-nav and a spin of fate.
D
urrant began his career journey in customer service, running the
Phillips Consumer goods call centre. He then decided to apply for a job at Affinity Internet to run their call centre. “They asked me to do a presentation and, off the back of it, decided that I would be much more effective as an account manager so they asked me instead to run their new Powergen account,” recalled Durrant. “Within the year we had nearly one million signed up for our telephone service. That account base was then bought by Telstra Europe and the rest is history.”
Durrant was looking for a challenge and believed that Virtual1’s Managing Director Tom O’Hagan had spotted a gap in the market. “The opportunity to be part of a company in that stage of its evolution was exactly the challenge I was looking for,” he said. “Plus I had worked with Tom at Telstra and knew that if anyone had the ability to make it successful, he did. When I joined, I was only the fifth employee. We now have nearly 40.”
The first project that Durrant worked on was Virtual1’s online pricing tool. “Tom and I both believed that the market was heading
towards self-provisioning tools and we have been proven correct,” Durrant explained. “Now, our pricing tool includes quotation, provisioning, support and monitoring capabilities and we are investing in further tools as well. The real priority for us now is understanding our partners’ strategies and then working out what they will need from us in order to deliver.”
Another big focus area is the cloud, and investments in solutions such as the Cloud Exchange help partners create a point of differentiation, claims Durrant. “The challenge is that we have to try and second guess a lot of what is happening but because we have invested long-term in the right infrastructure in terms of our network and data centres, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of being able to respond to our partners’ needs quickly.”
As a wholesaler, Virtual1 realised that having real-time tools to support its partners was essential because the days of manually quoting for every circuit or sending weekly updates in Excel to customers are long gone. “As in our personal lives, we expect to be able to access the information we want instantly and available at our
with our partners so that they can sell to one another on-net, always maintaining privacy and QoS.”
Simon Durrant
fingertips,” said Durrant. “So the launch of our 1Portal tool in 2010 and its subsequent upgrade in 2012 with real-time provisioning and support updates have been huge achievements for me personally and for the business. They have had a major impact in the way that we interact and support our partners.”
Virtual1’s focus on its London network has been around the London areas that have the greatest density of businesses. “We’ve seen a significant increase in larger bandwidths,” explained Durrant. “We’ve formed alliances with key carrier partners to develop a fully diverse, 100 per cent SLA solution that can be delivered
on 100Mb all the way up to 10Gb. We have also invested in Clever Connectivity, which means that the same circuit can be used for any type of traffic, be it WAN, Internet, SIP, cloud etc. This means that our partners can deliver bespoke, flexible solutions to their customers while keeping costs competitive.
“The other advantage of this is that it really ties in with the idea of complete supplier integration. By combining circuits with our hosting infrastructure we can create a private cloud solution that can literally interconnect with any supplier to carry any type of traffic, securely. We have been working to develop our own Cloud Exchange, establishing interconnects
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Customers have to see value in the professional services resellers provide otherwise it is a straight comparison of cheap Internet, according to Durrant. “Adding further services to our infrastructure will allow partners to differentiate and leverage the expertise of the partner,” he explained. “When doing so, you will tend to find that all of the solutions are different. Resellers that add no value to the services they are buying, just sell a cheap Internet circuit and presume it has no other function for the next three years show a lack of foresight and create a bad deal for us, them and the customer. Partners need to add value to the connectivity they supply to the customer so that they gain more wallet share, and in doing so gain more value from the customer, ultimately justifying the overhead of managing the customer.”
Just a minute with Simon Durrant...
What talent do you wish you had? Patience! I get frustrated when things don’t move at my pace
Name one thing you could not do without in your job: The support of a good boss
How would you like to be remembered? As the man who made goatees cool
What possession could you not live without? A BlackBerry
What is your biggest career achievement? Being part of the success that Virtual1 has achieved over the past six years
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