Young, Dynamic and Forward Thinking

Comms Business Magazine talks to O-bit Sales and Marketing Director Elizabeth Sparrow and Managing Director Jenny Herd about their plans for 2011.

O-bit was formed in 2002 and today it is a £20m a year network services company employing some 56 people based in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Their product portfolio includes traditional lines, calls and minutes as well as broadband, hosted telephony, SIP, MOLS and IP/VPNs. O-bit has its own core network and data centre which hosts their own and third party applications.

Jenny Herd, Managing Director of O-bit, is excited about the prospects for their recently launched FTTC product which was released at the end of 2010.

“Of all the E-casts we have done to our reseller base the one regarding our launch of FTTC generated the most response. O-bit customers are set to see the full benefits of FTTC of which include up to 40Mb downstream and a choice of 2Mb or 10Mb upstream making it the most powerful DSL product available on existing infrastructures. Resellers can offer their customers improved productivity as Fibre Broadband gives businesses the power to run real time applications over a DSL technology.

To make the provision of FTTC easier for our resellers our Merlin Portal has a cabinet availability checker. In fact the Merlin Portal is very much one of O-bit’s USPs as it is a single route in to O-bit for channel partners and an interface for provision, quotes, availability checking, billing, and marketing tools. It is also available in white label form for our reseller to use with their own customers.

The added advantage of our Surfwise FTTC is that resellers are able to re-grade easily from existing Surfwise products or other DSL providers and remain in control with regular order confirmations at every stage of the order process including order acceptance, delivery date confirmation, installation, missed appointment and order completion. They will also have the ability to choose service profiles for stability and throughput.”

Sales and Marketing Director Elizabeth Sparrow is keen to point out that O-bit has upgraded their WLR3 facility for channel partners which also runs through the Merlin Portal.

“WLR2 is due to cease in March 2011 and the heavy workload associated with it will disappear as we move to WLR3, a ‘zero touch’ process. Our surveys show however that despite the short time left before WLR2 is switched off more than 40% of resellers have done nothing in regard to migrating their customers to WLR3. Most will now need to find a partner quickly as migrations take time and need to be scheduled.

The time savings that will be made by O-bit in switching to WLR3 are significant and we anticipate using this freed up resource to enhance our channel partner support.”

O-bit is expecting a very busy February and March but has confirmed that all of their own channel partners are trained on WLR3 and have migrations scheduled.

What about plans for 2011?

Jenny Herd, “Many resellers are still just selling traditional lines and calls as they don’t understand DSL and IP networks. We are therefore continuing to run monthly workshops at O-bit educating our channel partners on new technologies and the opportunities they present.

These workshops work and illustrate that as we grow as a company we are still able to retain the personal touch with our partners – there is always a director attending each of these sessions.”

What makes O-bit different?

Elizabeth Sparrow, “There are a range of reasons why resellers should partner with O-bit. We have already mentioned our Merlin Portal but O-bit is also an ISP and carrier with our own network and interconnects with Opal, BT, Virgin Media and Tiscali. We are also 100% channel focussed, understand the market and are a tried and tested wholesaler.

Unlike many of our competitors who have been forced to buy billing companies in the last 12-18 months O-bit foresaw the need for our own billing platform many years ago. We have a team of 13 software developers here who amongst many other projects designed and build our own billing system.

O-bit is a young, forward thinking and dynamic company – three out of the five directors are 30 years old or younger. 2011 is looking to be another highly successful year for us, and importantly, our channel partners.”