Posted 8/5/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email
How do the recently announced MegaPath mergers with Covad and Speakeasy/Best Buy benefit telecom agents and channel sales partners? I put that questions and others to Craig Young, MegaPath's Chairman & CEO recently to get it straight from the top.
Click here to download the MP3 recording of the interview or the player below to listen now. Scroll down a bit further to read a rough outline of what I think Craig highlighted.
Please share your comments below.
(Please note that the following is not an exact transcript but my own notes.)
00:00 What does the MegaPath / Speakeasy/Best Buy merger bring to the MegaPath / Covad party that MegaPath telecom agents and channel sales partners that they didn't already have?
Speakeasy really brings a focus around what they've been doing with hosted VoIP. They've got a great platform and a great channel distribution network. They're adding 30,000 hosted VoIP seats from their Broadsoft platform to our Broadsoft platform which will make for a very easy integration.
01:10 It appears that Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley will head the retail & channel sales units. One would expect he'll have a preference for his own sales team and crowd out the MegaPath channel folk. Will MegaPath agents need to learn to work with new channel sales & support people from Speakeasy?
Dan Foster the Chief Sales & Marketing Officer of MegaPath will retain that position and all the business sales and agent channels will continue to be managed by Dan. Dan will have more sales resources now to work with.
02:00 What part of the hosted VoIP market is Speakeasy known for?
Speakeasy's average customer size is 10 - 12 seats and they've got about four to five years experience. They have great network of outside IT sales partners and a great in-house inside sales team that does a good job of selling their hosted seats on a nationwide basis.
02:40 Will telecom agents and independent channel sales partners find themselves competing against Megapath's new and improved in-house inside sales team?
Both MegaPath and Speakeasy have had inside and outside sales organizations that have happily co-existed for years.
03:48 "Ten to twelve seats" & "Best Buy" suggests "low end of market" is Speakeasy a "BYOB" hosted VoIP provider where customers need to "bring their own bandwidth"?
Speakeasy does both. They mostly did customers with 50 seats or less - sometimes doing 50 to 100 seats.
04:30 When MegaPath rolled out hosted VoIP in February it seemed like it was only as an add-on to a MegaPath MPLS customer. With Speakeasy are you telling the market that Megapath wants to now do smaller BYOB hosted VoIP deals?
We'll do both. When customers consider VoIP whether PRI, SIP trunks or just access, or whether they want the full bundle with MegaPaths Duet service and/or our security products, we want to have a full service offering for them to choose from. If customers want to bring their own access and have MegaPath manage the hosted VoIP on top as a managed service, we're fine with that too.
05:48 Is there a grand plan behind all the mergers? What market sweet spot are you going after and against whom do you aim to compete? Is it against AT&T, Verizon & Qwest or PAETEC, XO & Level3 or maybe Smoothstone & Telesphere?
We're targeting three sweet spots. First we intend to aggressively attack the SMB ('small & medium sized business") and mid-market with both direct and indirect (agent) channels with bundled products like voice, data, security & Internet access at a competitive price. Second, we're going after the enterprise space with even more direct reps than we have today and also our inside channels with our nationwide VPN and VoIP bundles to all the multi-location and multi-site customers. This is one of our significant competitive and market differentiators. Third, we're expanding the nationwide access footprint for our wholesale channel.
So really we compete against all the competitors you mentioned. Our strategy is to take a small bite out of all of our competitor's lunches.
09:09 First & foremost, does MegaPath want to be known as a managed services company, a dial-tone company or a voice & data access company?
We have one of the best nationwide access footprints in the country so that likely comes first but we're also one of the first IP managed services companies in the US.
10:48 PAETEC caused a bit of a stir buying an equipment and systems integration company named Quagga recently. Any similar "unfair advantage" plans for MegaPath?
MegaPath will continue to partner with outside partners that provide hardware, equipment and systems integration solutions.
12:10 Anything else you'd like to share about how MegaPath is the company partners should "lead with or lose against"?
We're consolidating MegaPath, Covad & Speakeasy to join forces and give our customers and partners more products, support and expertise as well as a true IP based solution and the financial backing to be a force in this marketplace for years to come. We welcome all agents to be a part of our family.
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