Technology Reseller - v29

technologyreseller.co.uk 31 INSIGHT He added: “The second key question resellers should ask about any portal is who is sitting behind it? If the reseller wants any changes, how do they get those changes done? It could be that the supplier has to go through a whole chain of third party companies just to get on the change list, whereas at VanillaIP we have over 100 software engineers working full time on our portal. That is a significant development resource for our reseller partners.” Helping you to grow Emily Nerland, Channel Director for EMEA of solutions. “VanillaIP is a services-based supplier capable of providing applications such as hosted telephony, contact centres, all forms of connectivity and much more – all on demand. Our portal is API-driven, which means our resellers can provision, say, broadband from a number of network services companies and collaboration and analytics applications from other vendors. All in an integrated end user solution and all provided on a single bill,” he said. Dadds concedes that the products and services on VanillaIP’s portal won’t represent the entire portfolio that a typical reseller with pre-existing relationships and ‘favoured’ products would want to offer its users, but argues that this need not be a problem. “In such instances, we can use our API to build these products and services into our portal, so they are included in the overall solution for reseller simplicity, with a single set of keystrokes and, again, just the one user bill. If they prefer, resellers can choose to keep their favoured services separate. But in either case the reseller has full control of the entire process, including pricing.” Business portals have become a must-have feature for any Software as a Service provider worth its salt. They can be a real differentiator for suppliers and, if well featured with a flexible, customisable interface, offer big benefits to resellers too Supplier portals have been around for some years but not all have been well thought out. Too many companies with diverse product portfolios have tried to get by with a separate portal for each product grouping, e.g. hosted telephony, connectivity and mobile solutions. As resellers well know, end user customers tend not to work that way. They want a more holistic solution, where one portal carries out most of their provisioning. In a world increasingly driven by AI, bots and machine learning, a supplier portal needs to be the go-to pane of glass to cease, supply and bill any service. The advantages of having a ‘one screen does all’ portal have been clearly evident during the Covid-19 crisis, when the ability to remotely provision multiple services has been a huge benefit. VanillaIP Managing Director David Dadds, for example, reports a 400% increase in services provision in the month of March alone. Portal benefits Dadds believes successful supplier portals should help resellers grow their business and contribute towards the retention of customers by supporting a broad choice Portals – A Window on Business I N S I G H T Continued... Emily Nerland