Adam Cathcart, managing director, Onecom Partners, share their strategy and ambitions.
9 Partners recently unveiled a new brand identity – Onecom Partners – as the company looks to channel growth with new products and services for partners. Martin Flick, CEO of Onecom Group (pictured above, left), and Adam Cathcart, managing director, Onecom Partners (pictured above, right), caught up with Comms Business to outline what this approach means for the company’s partners.
When asked to summarise Onecom’s acquisition of 9 Group and his vision moving forward, Flick explained, “It was a strategic acquisition for us. We had a successful business that had been established for a long time – it’s our 20th anniversary this year – and we’ve built a business that is very effective at the direct-to-customer approach across small, medium and large businesses.
“We were very successful in the SMB space, but there was no way that we could get reach across the enterprise market segment with our own resources. Buying a best of breed channel business was the obvious step for us and it was a strategic manoeuvre. Are we in it for the long term? We absolutely are. We are making big investments into our channel programme. We are going to dare to be different to challenge the market.
“The UK is facing into uncertain times [with] unrest in Europe, political change, economic uncertainty, there’s a cost of living challenge with rising costs for businesses and their employees, and you’ve got software vendors providing products or services that will be disruptive to the products that the channel has sold historically.
“On that last point, I’m talking in particular about on-premise, but even hosted telephony [could be affected]. We are making big investments to our channel strategy to help partners face into those challenges and help their end customers navigate what is inevitably choppy waters.”
Flick returned to his point about daring to be different. He said, “I’ve spent a long time being involved in businesses where I’ve been a channel partner. Over the years I drew up a wish list of things that I’ve wanted to be offered to me by the big distributors, wholesalers, carriers, or network providers that I’ve worked with. I’ve seen what good looks like and I’ve seen what doesn’t work so well.
“Our strategy is to offer our partners products and services and a toolkit that will help them to navigate those choppy waters. We’ll help them differentiate in a crowded market and add value to their end customers.”
Capability over scale
Flick explained why Onecom Partners has chosen to not operate a tiered partner programme. He said, “I don’t think that, just because you’re big, you should get access to higher levels of discount. When you’re talking to partners it’s about capability, not scale. The partners that are more capable, and the partners that want to sell multiple products or services will be supported.
“Overall, we are going to invest in partners that align themselves to us. If you nail your colours to our mast, we will invest more time and effort in helping you scale up your business, develop and grow. But that’s not limited to a few partners. It’s not a network where there’s only room for a handful.
“Anybody and everybody in our partner channel that wants to scale up their business, wants to take a broader set of products and services, wants to work more closely with the Onecom Partners team, we’ll invest in equal measure with all of those partners. It’s not an exclusive club, and therefore it’s not a tiered system.
“What we do want to do is create an ecosystem of businesses in the channel that we are supporting, where we can help everybody to achieve their objectives.”
The feedback loop
In September, the Onecom team hosted over 120 partners to provide an overview of the company’s strategy directly to partners. Cathcart explained that initial feedback from existing partners and prospective partners has been broadly positive, with many proactively following up with the Onecom Partners team to find out more.
Tracking feedback and evolving their approach in line with that feedback will be vital, and Cathcart said this is something they “have always done”.
He added, “Our partners play a key role in how we refine and develop our business. Changes that we’ve made in regards to our channel strategy, since the Onecom acquisition, has been driven largely by feedback from partners.
“Historically 9 Group had its own IP offering and, with that, its own connectivity platform as well. That became the preferred product that we would sell. One of the things that we’ve done within our partner business is: we’ve refined it to being a true aggregator of services.
“Relationships that we hold with suppliers like Vodafone and BT Wholesale, means we can provide partners with access to tier one carriers and networks and provide them with best of breed products and competitive commercials. That’s been crucial to the change in our strategy.”