The company will continue to provide BT’s complete range of broadband, data connectivity and voice services as its premium offering but will add to this an extensive range of alternative connectivity options, managed services and hosted applications. It will also continue to use its unique through-selling business model to generate sales which it will then pass on to locally-based resellers who will provide fulfilment and on-going service and support.
Over the past five years, DMSL has worked with well over 1000 resellers in the UK and signed up over 70,000 end user customers to BT broadband connections. This has created a massive ready-made market that is now ready to move onto the next stage of development, says Managing Director of DMSL, John Carter.
“What we’re planning to do is build on the foundations we have laid through our success with broadband”, says Carter. “To do that we need to give SMEs and reseller more options and more choices. Just about everyone who wants broadband has got it – now they need to know how to get more out of it and that will present an even bigger opportunity for resellers. DMSL is going to show its channel partner how they can exploit the potential of this market to the full by selling hosted applications, managed services, VoIP, remote connectivity, automated backup and disaster recovery, video-conferencing and collaboration applications and much more.”
By expanding the range of solutions and services it offers, DMSL is also paving the way for resellers to move to a more sustainable business model – one based on services and subscription revenues rather than product sales. “Let’s face it, the old model, where resellers simply added a margin to a product before they sold it are gone”, Carter says. “The future is all about generating recurring revenue streams based on the services you can deliver rather than simply selling more boxes than you did last month.”
Carter believes that within a decade most small businesses will be using managed and hosted applications and services to run their businesses. “Like most new technology waves, it will not happen overnight but one day all SMEs will use hosted services for just about all their IT needs. Broadband is the big enabler but it’s the services that will really start to change the landscape and the way businesses buy and technology.”
Resellers need to start adapting to this dramatic change right away, he concludes. “If you don’t face up to the faces, you probably won’t be here in five years time. The market is changing – and so are vendors and service providers. There will always be a need for locally-based ICT specialists who can hold the hand of SMEs looking to exploit the latest technology. But in the future they will be looking for a very different kind of service from local resellers – one that is much more about the management of IT services and much less to do with their initial supply and installation. By then, they will probably be giving away laptops with breakfast cereals.”