Comms Business Magazine recently met up with Steve Harrington, recently appointed as Director of Channel, EMEA, at SDN services company Masergy, to find out more on what his company had to offer the channel. In a nutshell, he says that is more cross-sell and up-sell revenue, lower churn and more referrals.
Masergy Communications, headquartered in Plano, Texas, is a software defined networking services company founded in 2000. It has grown to over 500 employees and still vigorously recruiting staff and channel partners for their Hybrid Networking, Managed Security, and Cloud Communications portfolio.
Director of Channel Steve Harrington says Masergy delivers hybrid networking, cybersecurity and cloud communications to global enterprises for clients.
“The main message I would like the channel to understand is that if they come across clients with international presence then please don’t try and provide the solutions all on your own as we are here to help you both secure and deploy those services.
The reasons our channel partners work with are simple. Firstly, we provide innovative solutions and a great service wrap. We really are easy to do business with as reflected by our Net Promoter Score of 74 which un-matched in the technology sector. We have a customer churn rate of less than one per cent and an SLA that delivers a guaranteed response time in five minutes.
All our services are customisable which means that every client gets exactly what they want rather than a one size fits all from one of our larger competitors.
Secondly, Masergy channel partners get paid by us forever, for as long as the services are in contract.”
Harrington says that Masergy supplies the SD-WAN infrastructure and control to around 1300 customers world-wide with global voice services are provided via their Broadsoft platform.
“As you might imagine, our global cyber security business is growing as enterprises and their supplier partners rise to the emerging threats. Presently we supply systems, products and people to over 250 global clients.”
The company provides voice, data, and video network services across the globe, specialising in Ethernet-based virtual private networks (VPNs) and wide area networks (WANs), Masergy's cloud services include network and application management, global cloud communications, and hosted remote access. Masergy’s managed services focus on disaster recovery and security.
In 2017, Masergy added a new option to its SD-WAN service called SD-WAN Go, which includes embedded firewalls, zero-touch provisioning from the Masergy portal, and WAN optimisation.
Global Partner Program
According to Steve Harrington a value-added re-seller, a system integrator, a consultant or an IT solution provider wants technology partners that are just that — partners.
“We help your customers transform their networking, security, and communications while increasing your revenue. In addition to great technology, you want unmatched service. With our award-winning partner program, you get both.”
Masergy tends to operate mostly in the mid-market and Harrington is building channels in the UK, Europe and Australia.
In a nutshell, he says for partners this means ‘more cross-sell and up-sell revenue, lower churn and more referrals’.
Ed Says...
Masergy has a strong presence in the recently (February 2018) published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Networks, Global and scores very high for its completeness of vision. Earliest to the SD-WAN market, Masergy leverages both proprietary and third-party hardware to deliver managed SD-WAN. Masergy delivers NFV services from vCPE devices, or from 48 NFV service nodes supported by a much larger number of access nodes. This platform also supports managed hybrid WAN and SD-WAN services. Additionally, Masergy has SIP trunking services in 21 countries and delivers low latency over a single, unified dialling plan globally.
Of Masergy’s strengths, Gartner says:
- Masergy offers a global NFV and vCPE platform with a wide range of VNFs, including SD-WAN, router, firewall, WAN optimisation, session border controller and encryption.
- In addition to real-time customer control, Masergy's unified Intelligent Service Control (ISC) portal offers extensive analytics, visibility and reporting across all managed SD-WAN solutions.
- Masergy offers direct cloud connectivity via its Direct Cloud Connect service to eight cloud providers, including AWS, Google and Microsoft, across 17 locations worldwide, backed by market-leading SLAs that extend similar availability and performance metrics through to the cloud provider.