From the Netwolves newsletter comes a story about 2 carriers teaming up and helping an Agent make a big sale.
Customer has multiple locations and wants Ethernet Service in all of their sites. They want the carrier to provide fully managed routers and switches and they want it all on a single invoice. What do you do?
These are the types of opportunities that agents are running into all the time. NetWolves and Abovenet are partnering together to provide a Fully Managed, "High-Low" Capacity offering. We can utilize Abovenet for your customers' High Capacity, "On Net" circuits while leveraging some of our other underlying providers to deliver the Low Capacity circuits to their other locations. NetWolves can also provide a fully managed solution, including all of the necessary hardware.
An agent was working with Abovenet trying to develop a solution for a prospect's four locations. This customer was looking for VPN services with High Capacity requirements at three of the sights and a Lower Capacity circuit at the fourth location. They also wanted a fully managed solution on a single provider. Abovenet was able to deliver Gigabit Ports to three of the locations but could not provide a Fast Ethernet Port to the fourth location.
NetWolves sales and engineering resources were introduced into this opportunity. After numerous discussions on Netwolves Management and Monitoring capabilities, as well as Abovenet's network capabilities and SLA's, the customer was sold on a Fully Managed, "High-Low" Solution. Netwolves was also able to find an Ethernet provider for the other location so the Fast Ethernet circuit they wanted could be installed. All of this was provided on a single invoice to the customer.
I spoke with Mike Grossman, Netwolves VP of Channel, at the airport about the moves that Netwolves are making in Mobile Data, broadband partners and managed services.
In mobile data, Netwolves resells Sprint 3G/4G data products to enhance sales for agents by providing 3G backup to broadband sales. Netwolves offers broadband from a number of carriers including most cablecos (like Comcast, Cox, SuddenLink, Cablevision, Bright House, TWC and Charter). A one stop broadband shop.
In Managed Services, Netwolves kind of started in this space with a NOC and customer premise gear being monitored 24/7. Today, unlike some services that are really just a drop shipped pre-configured router to attach the MIS circuit to, Netwolves can configure the routers for the customer and monitor the router, IP-connected devices (like a printer or laptop), perform URL filtering, proactive network monitoring, and network management in the form of graphing of usage, utilization and destinations.
Netwolves is a vendor member of TCA.
So at Channel Partners Expo in Vegas, it was interesting to see Broadsoft with a booth. Broadsoft customers - Momentum, Telesphere, Simple Signal and others - were exhibiting, but Broadsoft is bringing Hosted PBX knowledge and marketing directly to the Channel.