Gamma helps resellers confront their fears in Room 101 in the MinCom building deep in the heart of AirStrip One. See, you’re confused already so let Harry Singh, Data Sales Specialist at Gamma, hold your hand and explain it all.
Harry Singh, Data Sales Specialist at Gamma, takes us through Gamma’s latest offering, Converged Private Networks, the opportunity it presents to the channel and why your customers should be buying it.
What is CPN?
Gamma’s CPN (Converged Private Networks) offering, is more commonly known in the industry as MPLS or IPVPN. In short it’s a private network designed specifically around individual customer requirements. On the back of our success with our connectivity options (ADSL, FTTC, Ethernet) we wanted to provide a platform to cater for multi-sited customers and allow them to truly converge all their communications needs across a single network.
How does Converged Private Networks work?
Ultimately, it’s based on MPLS technology, a method of ensuring data packets get to where they’re supposed to and are prioritised appropriately and securely - and this is assisted with levels of QOS (quality of service). For end customers this means they can pick and choose what is relevant to their business (e.g. IP voice, internal CRM, Citrix traffic) and ensure this traffic isn’t impacted by anything else on the network, leaving them to crack on with the day job and not worry about slow speeds or performance issues!
What is different about Gamma’s offering?
Fully integrated with our market-leading IP voice products (Gamma SIP Trunks and Horizon cloud-PBX), customers will benefit from a purpose-built combined voice and data network. With its multi-site nature and an easy to use centralised management platform, Horizon provides the capability to connect multiple sites. In doing so it increases the addressable market and margin opportunity for channel partners selling voice and data solutions, while providing the added benefit of being able to secure higher value and ‘stickier’ longer-term contracts.
A single point of contact for both data and IP voice (including porting) throughout the sales and implementation process, as well as in-life, will also help reduce complexity for channel partners. With the majority of businesses looking to consolidate their data and voice networks on the back of refreshing their existing WANs, this converged approach offers differentiation by making it easier to do business with than other resellers that are managing different upstream suppliers for voice and data.
What are the top reasons resellers should sell Converged Private Networks?
Currently there are over 400,000 installed MPLS networks in the UK, which have typically been installed for 3-5 years. The cost of Ethernet access is decreasing making it more readily available to SME’s (Ovum predicts UK Ethernet will grow at a compound annual rate of 14.6% between 2015 and 2018) and end customer usage is changing. If we add in the fact BT is planning to shut down the ISDN network in 2025, these are all drivers for customers to refresh their networks and increase their connection speeds, network design, and voice set-up.
To help drive this change Gamma can provide an opex-only charging model to resellers which enables them to offer a zero charge migration cost to move existing networks over. Ultimately this provides resellers with a chance to make a clean sweep in terms of services sold to a customer as part of a network deal – IP voice, underlying analogues lines, connectivity, maintenance and installation – a truly sticky solution!