We aim to simplify the interaction, enable access to the newest forms of technology and facilitate partner growth, alongside our own. We believe this can only be achieved with the latest innovative and solid infrastructure at the core of our business, which is why we have invested heavily in this over the past 12 years. We’ve grown our network organically and through acquisition and it’s absolutely fundamental to our business and strategy. We’ve built our own data centre and connected it directly to our network whilst also appreciating the importance of having peering relationships with all of the key carriers in our sector. We’ve also recently brought to market a true cloud UC proposition that is also connected to our network. We are slowly but surely establishing ourselves to represent what the analysts are describing as the Third Platform.
So what is the Third Platform and why is it relevant to the Channel?
It’s a foundation based on mobility. It’s the way that people in organisations work, how they access data, how they transact with their customers and colleagues in business – which is currently primarily via mobile devices. Although it is gradually becoming more sophisticated – we may be talking mobiles and tablets right now, but smartglasses, wristbands and smartwatches are increasingly being adopted. Business people have a need to access all of their information via mobile devices, and our partners have to provide the solutions for them to operate in this agile way. In the Third Platform model, mobility is the foundation supporting the four key pillars and we have aligned our business to support this;
Cloud - having the ability to access all of your information on a mobile device from platforms that are developed to be quick in response, easy to access, secure, resilient and available anywhere. This is exactly what we’ve done with our data centres, our hosted proposition and the PartnerEye portal. Our Synergy UC solution is truly cloud based with resilient infrastructure which has multiple connections into our network in London and Amsterdam – we want our partners to be confident that their customers have a solid experience with the technology with the redundancy that a business needs. And it can be designed, bought and managed through our powerful PartnerEye portal.
Mobility – this really develops the foundation of what I’ve just explained about the Third Platform and the ever-growing need for interoperability with these devices. We constantly question what else we can do with mobile devices to make us more effective in the market. Whether that’s accessing the PartnerEye portal from a mobile via our rapid platform, checking leased line costs and providing customer-ready quotes on your tablet whilst sitting in front of your customer or using our Solution Builder tool to quickly knock together a complex UC solution which provides a graphical representation of the specification with a price tool that tots it up as you progress – that’s really what I meant when I refer to business agility.
Big data and analytics – I think we, and the Industry as a whole, have a long way to go here. There’s an inordinate amount of data being created by each and every company on a daily basis. We may not be in the business of making sense of, and forming predictions from, all of that data, but we are instrumental in enabling other businesses to make the most of the data by providing them with the data access they need. As customers demand bigger quantities of data and the number of transactions increase, so does the volume of their bandwidth requirements – so it’s now a daily occurrence to see our partners quoting 100/100 Mbps connections. We also know that in order to process big data, businesses can use providers like Amazon Web Services.
Social business – We know that social media is having a big impact on how customers make purchasing decisions and we are fully aware that we have to tailor the way we sell to cater to that. We all hear horror stories of the one unhappy customer, who writes the one critical comment about poor service or products they received and the whole world finds out about it with the immediacy of the news flooding the web. We have been stripping back to basics to get the fundamentals right at the core of our business to prevent that from happening. We want to have only good ‘word-of-web’ comments about us.
At Timico we have an emphasis on supplying our own factory of products and by definition they have to be joined up to enable us to provide a coherent level of service.
It is our mission to make it easy for our Partners to access our breadth of products so that they can service their customers effectively whilst making a decent margin. And with continual service improvements at the core of our culture, we believe that we are a future-proof and solid choice for any Partner.