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| Williams F1 Simulator and iPad Winner was Stuart Wood from Rallye Communications, 2nd was Daniel Akers (left) from Eastern Voice and Data and 3rd was Mark Munday (right) from DV02. |
Comms Business Magazine attended Neowave’s Road Show events last month where the distributor got together with seven of their vendor partners to provide an update on products – including two new own-brand offerings
Neowave Managing Director Justin Blaine has a Partner Pledge for his reseller channel; they will never compete with their partners and in all dealings they will be fair and honest.
“We will also always price properly and have reasonable contracts; if a vendor partner reduces costs to us then we will pass that reduction on to our channel partners.
“Our product portfolio has been selected very carefully. Neowave does not have ‘overlapping’ products so resellers will be dealing with a distributor that specialises in and is an expert at supporting each product.”
That product range, until the Road Show announcements, comprised the Aastra 400 Series of PBX platforms for the SME and Mid-Market plus their MX-One for Enterprise users. Sennheiser has been selected as their supplier of quality wired and wireless headsets for office, mobile and internet telephony applications whilst for call recording and call management Neowave provides the Tollring Solutions which work across ISDN and IP-based systems and provide an integrated solution for measuring, tracking and playback of calls across networks.
Justin Blaine, “We have partnered with Konftel, the Avaya-owned Swedish company, for audio conferencing products. As well as passionately sharing our channel-only ethos, Konftel provide innovative quality products. We were able to demonstrate at the road shows their useanywhere GSM-based conference phone live and on the fly to our delegates – they were clearly impressed!
“Neowave made its name initially with GSM gateways from 2N and today, whilst we are still working with that company it is their range of Helios IP door entry systems that are attracting dealers with their ease of deployment and rugged yet stylish designs.”
In today’s less than benign economic climate Blaine is keen to help his resellers win more with an innovative finance package.
“We work with broker Clear Asset Finance who really understand the channel, what they and their customers need but more importantly, they have some really innovative ideas on how to sell and supply leasing solutions which work for our reseller partners.”
New products
Seen for the first time by Neowave resellers was their NeoCloud hosted telephony offering which is a joint venture operation in partnership with hosted specialist Sweet Telecom. Here Neowave has come up with a very cost-effective hosted telephony solution based upon a full OPEX model that by definition has no up-front CAPEX costs that are normally associated with the handset pricing models of their competitors. There are three levels of core functionality that users can chose from and for the reseller to up-sell that start from a very modest price point.
“We have carried out a lot of research in to the potential market for hosted telephony and in our view 82% of all companies and organisations would benefit from our solution. Delegates were extremely keen to see our live product demonstrations which included a live video conferencing application.”
Also unveiled at the Road Shows was the new Neowave SipGate, an ISDN to SIP Gateway.Managing Director Justin Blaine says that there will be three versions of the product.
“SipGate is a cost-effective ISDN to SIP converter for basic and primary rate ISDN. Two versions handling either two or four ISDN2 lines and another that handles ISDN30 will be available.
“For the end-user this means cheaper line rentals as SIP trunks are cheaper than ISDN. For users that want to add more functionality to an existing PBX that they either cannot afford to churn or don’t want to the SipGate is ideal.
“For example, where is a PBX is operating at maximum capacity but you need to use FMC, softphones for home workers, need to add more extensions, maybe an ACD etc. – all of this can now be offered by our new NeoCloud BroadSoft hosted solution without the need to change.
“For resellers SipGate enables you to ring-fence customers by taking their existing PSTN numbers into the cloud and add new features.”
Blaine commented that the margins on SipGate are good, typically 60% plus and the end-user SRP will be a fraction of competitive products.
“We believe that we were pioneers of bringing GSM Gateway / FCT technology to the UK where sales exploded; we now believe we have the right product again with cost reduction, and a win win for the end-user and reseller.”
Ed Says
Getting resellers to give up their valuable selling time to attend a road show is a big ask but Neowave successfully pulled it off over three days in Durham, Oxford and London.