11 Takeaways from AT&T Partner Exchange Summit
Couldn't make it to this year's AT&T Partner Exchange Summit? We gathered the biggest takeaways from AT&T executives and partners to tell you what you need to know.
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We pulled the best soundbites from our interviews and the presentations from this year's AT&T Partner Exchange Summit. Click through to see thoughts from:
Brooks McCorcle, President of AT&T Partner Solutions
Tiffani Bova, Global, Customer Growth, and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce
Kelly King, Regional President at AT&T
Tim Yager, VP of Sales at Network Services Solutions
Phil Towle, Senior VP of Sales at Alliant Technologies
“It could not be a more exciting time. Today we've got 29 million connected devices on our network. It's just going to explode from this point out. We, AT&T, have been a leader in this area. In the small and medium-size business space in particular, we think solution providers just have a huge opportunity for growth. It is a wide-open, green field opportunity. When I think about the Internet of Things, it's like it's your imagination as a limiting factor. There's some research out there, I think it's by Gartner that says that 80 to 85 percent of Internet of Things devices they believe will be distributed through direct channels.”
– Brooks McCorcle
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“NetBond takes the best of security of a private cloud that gives you the access and flexibility and you use the scale of a public cloud. Think about it as a secure path from AT&T into AWS into Salesforce, into Cisco. We have, I want to say, 16 plus cloud partners that are in that space. I think what you saw in the announcement probably came out last week with going further with AWS is just a continuation of building that relationship. Using them for companies to provide that secure access. What does that enable a channel partner to do? It allows them to now take advantage of getting their customers up and running faster, taking advantage of the security that we have in the network, take advantage of the breadth of capability that there is in a cloud.”
– Brooks McCorcle
“Alliant was fortunate enough to actually be in the control of their production with NetBond, so we had already made a sale and we turned the service up to one of our customers. We sold the connection to Microsoft Manager. It was the very first one sold through the Partner Exchange, and we turned it up with absolutely no problem at all. It's a very valuable tool to help add value to the MPLS network that they have. Customers today are trying to determine do they keep their MPLS, or do they move to broadband? The price per megabit transport difference is remarkable, so having things like NetBond, network-based firewall, class of service, SIP trunking really justify MPLS and the premium price that customers pay for it…even though it is a premium service in terms of mean time to repair. You do get better service with MPLS, but customers are always evaluating do I really need to have this expensive network or should I just go to the internet and do my business that way? NetBond give them another reason to justify staying with MPLS.”
– Phil Towle
“The definition of a customer is significantly changing. You may say, "Today I sell to a small business. I sell to a small business owner. I sell to a human being." That's who we sell to today. IoT completely changed the definition of customer. The customers now could be things, could be sensors, could be machines, so you have a machine selling to a machine and negotiating price. Who does that? When the machine orders for another machine who do they call for customer service? There's going to be 60 billion customer service calls by 2017 from things. Who's going to take those calls? How do you even respond to something like that? At the end of the day, mobility…is the center nucleus of the success of everything that's happening from an IoT perspective. Without mobility, without internet access, without connectivity, without communication, it all falls apart really quickly. You tend to feel like you sell to a business, but you have to think about that business now is maybe putting wireless access points and maybe using robots to do customer service in their stores, maybe using iPads and other things to engage with customers when they're on a retail floor. Who's the customer in that scenario?”
– Tiffani Bova
“It's not an IT guy talking to an IT guy any more. We're seeing CEOs, CMOs, COOs. That's who you need to be advising. When you think about something like Internet of Things, it's not necessarily the IT guy who's going to be drumming up all the ideas and ways that we can use all that data that now can be connected to each other to create information that helps you make better business decisions. I think this is the chief marketing officer. It's the chief financial officer that's interested in improved productivity. We believe the opportunity is for partners to have a larger, richer conversation, with their customer, not just the IT guy talking to the IT guy.”
– Brooks McCorcle
“There's been a lot of chatter about data being the new oil. I would start by saying I agree data is the new oil, but I would then say to you that the refinery is actually analytics and gasoline is the intelligence…If you went to an oilfield and tried to fill up your car, it's not going to drive. Data for data's sake doesn't make any difference. You've got to refine it using things like artificial intelligence and tools that are now available to us, and using that intelligence to now make different decisions for business. I would say that one of the big strengths is not being reactive or proactive but being predictive in things that people make and anticipating the service calls, customer service—your car needing oil.”
– Tiffani Bova
“Twelve years ago we started talking about a new thing in this industry called partner-to-partner collaboration. It's taken 12 years of lots of stops and starts where I finally feel like we're at a place where partners understand that they're going to have to be really specialized around a particular set of technology. The vastness of requirements is just almost too much unless you’re of a certain size. You start to cross the $100 million mark, you start to have service capabilities potentially doing end-to-end solutions. When you're under $25 million, you have to remain fairly specialized, otherwise you stretch yourself to a place where you're not giving the best experience to customers.”
– Tiffani Bova
“We have this old adage about change being constant. The thing that I've learned is it's wrong. It's not constant. In fact, change is accelerating, and it's accelerating at a very rapid pace. It's just going to accelerate faster and faster and faster. It really comes down to the simple notion that the team that learns the fastest is going to win the fastest. The team that learns the fastest is going to win the fastest. If you look at various technologies over the last hundred years, you can see … the amount of time that it took for that particular technology to be adopted by 25 percent [of the population]. Electricity, it took almost 50 years. If you see the television, it took almost 25 years. If you look at smart phones, it took about three years. We can extend that to applications. Apple launched the first app store, took about three months. Has anybody here heard about Pokemon Go? It took about fifteen days to get 25 percent of the population use it. That's how fast things are changing.”
– Kelly King
“I think Internet of Things will still be a very hot topic. I think we'll be able to get more automation, virtualization, even network on-demand, collaboration. So much of it starts with mobility, and that is one of the key messages that we just keep banging on because mobility isn't necessarily the first thing in solution providers' minds as an area of growth. We feel like we need that in order for us to grow in this mid-market space. We're not otherwise reaching that space as robustly as we'd like to. It's imperative that wireless become part of their portfolio, that IoT become part of something that they can do so that they do become, if they are not already today, the strategic advisor as well as the implementer. We'll continue to pound away at that, but mobility, IoT, security—I don't think those are going away. I think you'll see the addition of virtualization, collaboration, and software-defined everything.”
– Brooks McCorcle
“I think Internet of Things will still be a very hot topic. I think we'll be able to get more automation, virtualization, even network on-demand, collaboration. So much of it starts with mobility, and that is one of the key messages that we just keep banging on because mobility isn't necessarily the first thing in solution providers' minds as an area of growth. We feel like we need that in order for us to grow in this mid-market space. We're not otherwise reaching that space as robustly as we'd like to. It's imperative that wireless become part of their portfolio, that IoT become part of something that they can do so that they do become, if they are not already today, the strategic advisor as well as the implementer. We'll continue to pound away at that, but mobility, IoT, security—I don't think those are going away. I think you'll see the addition of virtualization, collaboration, and software-defined everything.”
– Brooks McCorcle
Couldn't make it to this year's AT&T Partner Exchange Summit? We gathered the biggest takeaways from AT&T executives and partners to tell you what you need to know.
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