Credit: Vocus
Vocus is looking to double down on the amount of its networking and fibre products sold through channel partners as part of its five-year growth plan.
The Australian telecommunications provider currently sells 10 per cent of its products and services to public and enterprise customers via the channel, but hope to increase that to 20 per cent by 2024.
According to Monique Esplin, who joined Vocus as GM for indirect, channel, enterprise and government in January, the channel is the “most obvious” place for the company to execute its growth ambitions.
“We went to market with a very ambitious growth plan to double our revenue over five years,” she told ARN. “We also want to double the amount of business we do indirect during that period. We do about 10 per cent of government and enterprise through that now, and we want to double that over the next five years.”
Vocus currently has a network of 300 partners across Australia and New Zealand, which it divides into four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. These sell to roughly 5,300 enterprise customers and about 200 public sector bodies.
Although Esplin said the telco had a “group of very loyal partners”, it hoped to branch out further and recruit partners in managed and professional services, implementation, transition and project management.
From a technology perspective, she also claimed there was a “big opportunity” in hybrid cloud using Vocus’ own data centres and also in SD-WAN.
“There’s an opportunity to find some new partners with the right skill sets and capabilities in the services our customers are demanding,” she said. “We want to be the end-to-end solution: from Vocus networking plus partner services.”
In addition, Esplin is looking to further leverage Vocus’ relationship with the NBN Co, claiming its own fibre network would have a better chance of reaching regional Australia via NBN Co’s access points.
“We are also supporting the Cisco/NBN bundle through our channel and want to make sure our partners understand the value of Vocus alongside the NBN.”
“We want to simplify our product portfolio so we are pure network and pure fibre, and we offer a great network and SD-WAN, but also leverage the capabilities of our partners from a services perspective so we can deliver an NBN service for our customers,” she added.
Shortly after joining from Telstra earlier this year, Esplin hired Splunk’s Lani Edwards to serve in her team head of channel operations as part of an effort to “reinvigorate” Vocus’ business.
However, the fruits of that re-invigoration have yet to be seen in the publicly listed telco’s results, having posted a 44 per cent drop in net profit after tax (NPAT) this financial year.
It also closed the full year ending 30 June with flat revenue of $1.9 billion, or a 0.4 per cent increase from the previous period.
The telco is now hedging its bets in the Coral Sea Cable project, which being built by Vocus on behalf of the Australian Government and connecting the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea with Australia.
