Minutes will survive as a bundled mainstream service but voice resellers will have to reinvent themselves as IP carriers if they want to survive in the long-term, says BNS Telecom Chief Executive Garry Moat.
Moat was bullish in the face of the grim wider economic situation, telling Comms Dealer that after an intensive two-year period of ‘massive' investment in its IP product range and transformation into an IP carrier, BNS Telecom is pulling in £2 million of new business every month. "In a downturn, people make more calls, and 75 per cent of our customers are in contract and continuing to make calls," he said. "We are only now reaping the rewards of a significant change, and in the last three quarters of the year we've seen sales go through the roof. We now have three IP switches - two in London and one in Newcastle - and because we also have our own product suite we can use it to develop a range of products that our competitors don't have.
"We have made a paradigm shift from a marketing viewpoint"
"Most of them are selling phone systems, lines and calls. We say, get rid of exchange lines. 21st century telecoms is all about saving customers money, and we're in a market where people hear a lot of bad news and don't want to spend big cheques. At the same time, there is an awful lot of talk about IP telephony. Everyone thinks it's free. It isn't, but it can save customers a lot of money."
Moat said he expects the whole market to follow BNS Telecom's transformation example, and suggested that resellers who don't risk their own survival. "People will still require minutes, but most businesses are signing up to bundles and they expect to know what they will pay on a monthly basis," he said. "75 per cent of industry turnover and revenue still comes from minutes and exchange lines, but we've got to live in the real world and focus on what BT, Cisco and the big players are doing."
Marketing Director Andrew Crawford, who joined BNS Telcom in March, said the combination of innovative products with a strong brand has allowed the company to take a different perspective on the market and come up with a fresh look, complementing the big players' move to IP telephony. "We have made a paradigm shift from a marketing viewpoint, and there are some applications like call centres that can represent big cheques," he commented
Moat added that BNS Telecom's cash-back scheme, where customers earn money for inbound calls, has been a ‘fantastic success', allowing it to share the success of its new model with its customers. The carrier's fax-to-email service and VoIP package for mobile have performed well, and Moat said the product portfolio would be a major factor in the company's ongoing development. "Our mobile office offering in the first quarter of next year will bring a lot of the features of our IP product range, like inbound call payments, to mobile users," he said. "The need to have a device on the desk will become obsolete for some people. Already, demand from medium-sized businesses and enterprises is huge. There's been so much talk about one product fitting all, like the BlackBerry, but they haven't been able to make it the extension."
According to Crawford, the resilience of BNS Telecom's networks make it ideally-placed to offer unified IP-to-mobile services. Moat said turbulence among AIM-listed companies mirrors conditions in the FTSE, but believes the future of the high-tech industry is assured. "If you had half a million pounds to spare, would you buy cheap bank stocks or cheap telecoms stocks?" he asked "I don't look at the share price any more, we're just focused on driving forward the cash generation from our services and products so that we can push onwards and take on more staff. We can't complain. We're getting our fair share of the market. We've got 40 telesales staff and 50 sales people on the road, and a great range of IP products.
"Touchwood, we're not affected by the climate. There's a lot happening and we're just doing our own stuff. We've had some very good months since we launched our IP product range. The operation at our new Reading office continues to go well and we now have a national office in central London."