World Telecom Group Expands Into CDN With Olympusat

Master agency World Telecom Group (WTG) will facilitate sales of broadband, media and content delivery platforms through the channel thanks to a new partnership with Olympusat Telecom, the two companies said this week.

Olympusat is a subsidiary of Olympusat Holdings, the owner and distributor of a number of specialty networks, particularly Spanish-language networks, in the U.S. and Latin America. Its carrier and content delivery partners include Level 3 Communications and Akamai.

WTG agents will be able to offer Olympusat's video solutions -- cloud-based tools that push streaming video content out to the edges of networks at high speed -- to media customers and enterprises with content delivery network (CDN) needs, earning a residual income stream as a result.

[Related: WTG Sparks New Revenue Stream for Partners: Energy Sales ]

"Entertainment media, broadcasting, telecom -- all these things are converging. I mean, AT&T and Comcast now compete, right? So there's a big opportunity to drive partnerships to get at these customers," said C. Austin Powers, president of Olympusat Telecom.

Powers is a longtime telecom channel hand, having begun his career in the 80s with Cable & Wireless, spent a decade in sales management roles at MCI-Verizon and also served as a channel and sales team manager for Global Crossing and Primus Telecommunications. He and Vince Bradley, WTG's president and CEO, have known each other since about 2002, Powers said.

"He's always got a lot of perspective on this market and has a capability to look more at what's cutting edge," Powers said of Bradley and WTG.

Bradley said he sees the deal as a potential channel watershed.

"In the past, partners were able to sell CDN and some of this stuff but it was very much a 'mother-may-I' scenario where you had to ask for special treatment and it was very complicated sale," Bradley said. "So this is a breath of fresh air to have a true CDN product play into the channel. It's really a whole suite of services, though -- Olympusat has a suite that is so unique compared to a lot of the providers out there."

Media companies are an obvious target, Powers explained, but there are a number of enterprise customers who want to do more with their streaming video assets online and also want to keep Web surfers on their corporate sites instead of directing them to YouTube pages.

NEXT: CDN Services Make Channel Sense

If channel partners are already providing voice, data and infrastructure solutions to those types of customers, Olympusat’s Powers argued, then it makes sense to sell CDN-related media services, too.

"We're in good shape and cash flow positive," he said of Olympusat. "The big thing we lack is sales people: people who can go out and sell the services we offer. That's where WTG and its [community] come in. I think they'll find that what we offer and how we compensate is very similar to what they're used to from other transport providers, but our commissions can be astronomical."

WTG and Olympusat will next month kick off a series of training webinars to educate potential partners, and Powers said to expect other moves to increase Olympusat's visibility with both the IT VAR and telecom agent channels, although the company has no immediate plans to partner with other master agents beyond WTG.

"We want to walk before we run," he said. "We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, and it's not like we're CenturyLink and have a huge support mechanism to handle. I've been in that situation before and that can become a problem."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 13, 2012