Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What is the medium to long term strategy for Daisy Wholesale that you are implementing?
Terry O’Brien (TB): The last eight months since I took over have flown by, but I am incredibly pleased with the progress we have made. We recently completed the billing migration onto a much improved billing platform which all went well and the initial feedback has been very positive.
We have secured some very strategic partners over the last six months that have given us growth focus in some key verticals such as Education, Energy, Health Care and Financial Services
We have also been working hard to ensure we are bringing great products and services at great value to market.
Our investment in product specialists to support our partners’ growth has been working really well and feedback from our partners has been strong. It’s certainly helped some of our newer partners to telecoms get growing faster than they had planned
We have started to integrate the Netcrowd business acquired and our Servassure business in to Daisy Wholesale and I think this will be another very compelling product we can offer to our partners. Providing full white label, channel focused professional services capabilities – covering the design, installation and maintenance of networks, LAN, WAN, PBX and Telephone systems. This is going to significantly help our partners cover the full range of telecoms services for customers at a time when the channel continues to converge.
As part of the acquisitions and growth plans we have brought in some very talented and experienced people to the team and I am now confident I have a team of people who share our passion to provide great choice, great quality, great value and great service - We have a team very motivated to create real advocacy in our partners.
We are now into full planning to move to one single enhanced partner portal that we expect to have technically ready in October so we can begin training and migrating our partners to this enhanced solution. We will then have all our operations working off one set of systems, enhancing the capability we give our partners.
We are now also looking at how we further support our partners in the area of distribution. We already source mobile devices for partners but we know we could bring even further value and simplicity to the channel by expanding this service.
At the heart of everything we do will be a focus on Quality, Value and Choice.
CBM: What are you expecting to achieve with this strategy in terms of positioning and markets shares?
TB: We are investing in and building out Daisy Wholesale to be able to be a one stop Wholesale provider to the future state of the channel, enabling this convergence to happen quicker which we believe to be in the interests of partners and most importantly end user customers. Our business has always strived to help our partners grow and I think we are now doing the things that really help make that happen.
CBM: How significant is the hosted telephony product that has been added to the Daisy Wholesale portfolio in this strategy?
TB: We have recently launched our Hosted Voice solution (HVX), building it in a way that works for our range of channel partners – providing an accredited approach where partners take ownership of the implementation and also a Managed Service where we make entering this market really simple for partners by taking the implementation and ensuring the commercial arrangements work for the partner and the customer
CBM: What other products do you see as key in this strategy and what other products are planned for introduction in the short term?
TB: We are working hard to make all of our offers simple and great value – I also love unlimited products as it enables customers to get the most from their connectivity and takes away the commercial risk for them giving them much more controllable costs.
Daisy Wholesale has launched what I believe to be a mobile solution perfect for Wholesale partners, ‘The One and Only Tariff’. It’s simple, it’s great value, it’s low risk, it can be great margin. I want to now make mobile something all partners want to sell and really help partners on the journey to providing the end to end telecoms solution for their customers
We have also launched some great new pricing on our BT FTTC products and delivered really competitive unlimited broadband packages.
CBM: Will you be matching the free call terminations being offered by Gamma for their SIP trunks and hosted telephony products?
TB: We are bringing Fixed and Mobile much closer together with the launch of new mobile solution ‘The One and Only Tariff’ and HVX – we are giving customers who take both from Daisy free calls to and from the company mobiles. We all know this is where there is a key cost for customers so we are helping reduce that for them.