Technology Reseller - v30

01732 759725 28 TECHNOLOGY LIVE country who sell his print, calendars and so on, who will now be selling comms for him as well.” Time to research the market Justin attributes the interest in NTA’s platform partly to the fact that in lockdown resellers have had the time to assess different propositions and do the necessary due diligence. “If you are a dealer principal or a board director, you’ve probably got a bit more time now to sit back and ask what is the company strategy, where are we going, what are we going to do in the future?,” he said. It is also partly a product of NTA’s business model and the enhancements it made to its platform this time last year. “One of the biggest differentiators for NTA is that all other vendors sell on a ‘per seat’ basis, whether that is on a 30-day rolling contract or a three-year or five-year licence. We don’t sell to our partners like that. We sell on concurrency, not a cost per seat. Effectively, a partner subscribes to 10 channels at a time and can keep adding customers who share that concurrency. This enables them to make 80+% gross profit on our product,” he said. “Secondly, resellers are fed up with vendor-branded products leading to Dutch auctions, where, because the customer can see whose solution it is, they say ‘We have two other people quoting on the same thing, so what price can you do it for?’. Our offering is completely white-labelled; customers log-in to the portal via the reseller’s sub domain, so it looks as though it’s their platform.” Justin adds that this approach extends to the handsets and other accessories supplied by NTA. “The handsets we sell come from a manufacturer called Fanvil. Its products are available in the UK from another distributor, but because we deal directly with the company our handsets are completely unbranded. We can screen print them with Justin Blaine, Channel Sales Manager at business VoIP service provider NTA, didn’t know what to expect when the UK entered lockdown on March 23. He was confident that NTA had had a good March – a record month as it turned out – because resellers were deploying large numbers of remote working solutions. But beyond that, everything was uncertain. What he probably didn’t expect was that several weeks into lockdown NTA would be signing up new resellers. But that is exactly what happened. “For us, the weeks since March 23 have been very good,” Justin explained to Technology Reseller at the beginning of May. “In that time, we have signed nine new partners. One of the biggest is a £10 million managed services company in the north-east that had been working with other hosted providers and even hosted their own solution. They wanted to upgrade their system but realised that doing so would involve a big chunk of cash because it lacked a lot of functionality. Instead, they had a look at what was available in the market and decided to move all 600 seats from their own hosted system, plus 200 from another provider, across to NTA.” NTA hasn’t just signed up established telecoms resellers; it has also attracted completely new market entrants eager to branch out into hosted telecoms. “Funnily enough, one of the partners I signed up is a print company based in Suffolk that is looking to diversify. When I first spoke to the person who runs it, I thought he just wanted a solution for his own company, which also owns the business centre where it is based. He has various companies in there and wanted to upgrade their comms. But on top of that, he has agents up and down the the reseller’s branding. And resellers can give them their own model number – Joe Bloggs Telecom A10 or whatever – so that if the customer Googles the handset they will only be found on that reseller’s website. We now do that with headsets, with door entry solutions and with WiFi phones as well. “It is all about having the reseller’s brand in front of their customer so that they don’t feel under pressure to reduce margins at the point of sale just because their customer can buy that product elsewhere at a wholesale price,” he said. Changing requirements NTA has also been upgrading its platform to ensure it continues to meet customer needs, particularly around collaboration. It now offers Microsoft Teams integration via Call2Teams and has developed its own video solution for end users who don’t use Teams, which it has been offering to resellers free of charge since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, and which Justin believes is helping to change the way SMEs communicate. “We all talk about UC and collaboration but SMBs have tended not to use those enterprise-type features. If there are 10 or 20 people in an office, they don’t need that functionality. Before this crisis, probably 99% of customers on our platform didn’t have any collaboration at all. However, we have deployed video a lot in the last few weeks just to keep people working and communicating. So, we are definitely seeing an uptake on that side as well,” he said. www.nta.co.uk Discover how NTA can help you diversify your offering and win more business by visiting their stand at Technology Live at the Business Design Centre, London on October 13. Find out more at www.technologylive.co.uk In the run-up to Technology Live, taking place at the Business Design Centre, London on October 13, Technology Reseller is contacting key exhibitors to find out more about their channel offering. This month, James Goulding speaks to NTA’s Justin Blaine It’s your brand, make the most of it 2020 The Convergent Technology Event for IT Resellers & Providers Business Design Centre · London · 13 Oct 2020 2020 Justin Blaine