News in the Channel - issue #9

GIACOM REBRAND

advocate for the channel, driving home the message that local MSPs are a powerful force to drive productivity in the UK. Terry emphasises another factor that enables digital MSPs to thrive. “To grow a business that serves SMBs to a meaningful scale, MSPs need to deliver lots of products to lots of customers,” he adds. “This means that they need to take advantage of the innovation available in OSS and BSS systems that underpin the delivery of their offerings to their customers. Our portal and billing software are key components of that stack, as are integrations into PSA, RMM and other systems. Building a toolkit and a set of automations on top of the billing capability helps partners to deliver subscription-based managed services that can scale to hundreds or thousands of end customers. “Our fastest growing partners are getting their heads around these automations, the modern suite of products, the services that add value and the toolkits to automate and deliver time and again to small businesses. We are developing our Cloud Market platform with a focus on enabling digital MSPs to grow by delivering consistently effective managed services.” Underpinning everything is Giacom’s unified Cloud Market platform which incorporates all the functionality of four existing portals – DWP (wholesale telecoms), DPP (the portal for mobile distribution partners), Cloud Market (the SaaS cloud marketplace for IT partners) and Techstore (hardware as a service). Until now, they looked and operated differently. “Prior to launching our new One Platform experience we redesigned the four underlying portals to make them look and feel identical with a single user experience for the partner, modern, improved navigation and better performance,” explains Nathan. “We have built a single knowledge base for all products, with the menu tailored for partner type along with discovery of adjacent products to aid cross sell opportunities.” But this is just the beginning as a significant capital investment will be made into the platform over the next three years. “The launch of Cloud Market represents the first wave of investment,” adds Terry. “We have a clear vision and investment plan for supporting the channel in this converging technology world, to make it increasingly simple for partners to access everything they need to create brilliant technology solutions for their customers – and to help partners grow by supporting their evolution to digital MSPs.”

The rise of digital MSPs holds the potential not only to improve the value of the channel and accelerate the digital transformation of small businesses, but also close the productivity gap. “These are serious issues for our economy, particularly post-Brexit,” Terry adds. “Small businesses face big challenges with productivity, and we believe fundamentally that a good channel partner will help fix those problems.” But there are significant challenges associated with realising this opportunity, not least of which is that most small businesses do not know of a local MSP that can help. “Nobody is advocating for the channel,” Terry says. “Our role is to help MSPs support small businesses with technology. We are really focusing on using our scale to make the UK business community and Government aware of the channel as a powerful force to drive UK productivity.” Strategic pillars Four pillars underpin Giacom’s strategy to enable digital MSPs and make the channel more visible to small businesses: choice, scale, enablement and opportunity. Choice is delivered via the One Platform Cloud Market experience, with Giacom seeking to become ‘the Amazon of the channel’. In terms of scale, the combined spend of Giacom’s 5,000 partners through its platform has enabled it to spend more than £250 million with suppliers in the last year alone, enabling the company to deliver tremendous value to partners as well as provide access to ‘channelised’ collateral and content coming out of large vendors. Giacom’s strong, consistent compound organic revenue growth of 13% over the past five years is testament to the growth delivered by the channel, which is winning market share from carrier and vendor direct models. Enablement helps partners to diversify and take on new capabilities and certifications. Giacom partners benefit from a complete range of services such as training, specialist support, white label collateral and networking events to help them grow. And to realise opportunities, Giacom is leveraging its scale, influence and market position to be an

Nathan Marke COO

giacom.com

Prior to launching our new One Platform experience we redesigned the four underlying portals to make them look and “

feel identical with a single

user experience for the partner, modern, improved

navigation and better performance.

”