How Channel Partners can Gain from Carrier Ethernet Wave

By Zia Askari

As telecom operators and Internet service Providers are continuously striving hard to match the high-quality and high-availability connectivity requirements coming from the enterprise and the SMB side, it is Carrier Ethernet is holds great potential for channel partners to become connectivity enablers and gain fulfill the connectivity needs of their customers.

At a time when partners look forward to moving up the value chain, Carrier Ethernet can provide the much needed service oriented platform for the partner community to create big value for themselves.

Today’s enterprise community is engaged into embracing cloud and virtualization technologies and in order to enable all this, they need highly resilient connectivity which can be provided with Ethernet. Partners in such an Ethernet based ecosystem will include telecom agents, value added resellers (VARs), dealers, and managed service providers (MSPs) etc.

[caption id="attachment_2077" align="alignnone" width="300"] Mahendra Lalwani[/caption]

“Ethernet services are fast becoming important channel partners' portfolios. Ethernet can become quite critical when are selling, broadband access, call/contact center solutions, cloud communications and computing, conferencing & collaboration solutions, data center solutions, local & wide area networking, managed services, security,  voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and wireless services as well,” explains, Mahendra Lalwani, Founder, CMO, TelExcell.

Even though Ethernet deployment is not being done at a fast pace, telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Tata Communications and Reliance have been investing heavily in Ethernet as connectivity medium, to meet their enterprise customer demands.

Driving growth for the channel partner community, Ethernet's capability to scale makes it ideal for the rising adoption of cloud computing and IT services within the SMB and the enterprise world. Ethernet's scalability, low cost, big bandwidth and low maintenance overheads, make it a particularly attractive access method today.

“Today more and more enterprise customers are moving in for applications to better drive their data center connectivity, cloud computing and also consume video based applications. All this is further driving the need for more bandwidth and hence Ethernet is fast emerging as a business-class connectivity medium,” he adds on.

How Ethernet can help Partners

1- Ethernet can create the much needed differentiation for partners and hence it is viewed by many partners as a must-have due to high competition in the market place.

2 - Ethernet can also provide the partner community with an opportunity to move up the value chain.

3 - With Ethernet based technologies, partners also hold a big chance to enter larger sized enterprise clients and provide more sophisticated applications.