Q&A: Telarus Co-Founder Oborn On Helping Partners Sell Cloud And How UCaaS Is Fueling Need For SD-WAN

Growing By Leaps And Bounds

Telarus is experiencing a growth spurt. The Sandy, Utah-based master agent just completed its sixth annual Partner Summit and had more than 400 partners in attendance this year in Park City, Utah, enough to force Telarus to move to a bigger location next year to make room for new attendees.

The master agent is recruiting 80 to 100 new partners a month, and the company wants the channel to know about the tools and resources it is bringing to the table to help partners close more deals, especially around cloud and SD-WAN.

Telarus' co-founder Patrick Oborn sat down with CRN to talk about how telecom agents need to make the pivot to cloud, how hosted voice is actually driving the need for next-gen technologies like SD-WAN, and some of the tools that Telarus is putting in the hands of partners to make them more successful.

Here's what Oborn had to say.

Are agents making the pivot to selling cloud, and how is Telarus helping with this process?

We have had some legacy telecom agent partners say, "I don’t know how to make it pivot, so Telarus, here are your customers, here are your new business cards, and you now represent my brand and call my customers and get them interested in cloud," and we have. We sold $15,000 last month in cloud into agents' customer bases and in every case, cloud had never been sold to those customers by an agent before. Those agents have still never sold cloud themselves, but our books don’t reflect that -- those partners still qualify for [Telarus] President's Club credits, whether my people do it or they do it. Partners are starting to see that they can get it and make the pivot, or they can have Telarus help with the first couple of deals and then maybe take it back over once they feel comfortable, or we can do it for them. It's really three different layers. We can just support them, hold their hands, or do it [on behalf of the partner] and keep that recurring revenue going for them.

How much cloud is Telarus selling through its partners today?

Still as a percentage and in total dollar amounts, network services still overwhelms, but UCaaS is becoming a sizable piece of the business -- we'll do over a million in UCaaS this year, and last year it was about $200,000 so that's a massive 4-5x jump. In cloud computing, we'll at least double what we sold last year. We are going to get some [partners] that make the transition to email migration and disaster recovery, and some won't, but it’s the born in the cloud [agents] that will really start to kill it, similar to how a lot of telecom agent partners got their start years ago as born in the network players. That’s really when you'll see the channel kicking butt and taking names in cloud … when masters help partners get started with cloud selling, but it will take some time.

How big is the opportunity around SD-WAN for the channel today?

[SD-WAN] was a conversation last year, but I think the more customers ask their agents about it, the more the agents are starting to feel the pressure to learn about it. Before, customers weren't talking about it, so it was kind of brushed aside a bit. It was kind of like hosted VoIP – agents knew it was there, but people were still happy with their phone systems and there wasn’t this huge groundswell of people clambering for hosted voice. Then, all of a sudden, once people started to learn it could work with their CRM and what else it could do, it opened their eyes, and hosted voice caught fire.

Why is SD-WAN catching on so quickly with partners?

One of the reasons why SD-WAN is catching on quickly now is actually because of hosted voice and UCaaS. It's fueling the demand for SD-WAN because almost everything about UCaaS is over the top and most OTT connections [aren't good] so to make it work, SD-WAN has to fortify the bandwidth. The bandwidth fortification element of making UCaaS work is really where SD-WAN is starting to gain popularity. There is not enough bandwidth to run UCaaS over MPLS either. SD-WAN is the only thing that gives UCaaS what it needs to work with the quality that it needs. Apps are really driving the need for more bandwidth, and the quality of the apps is driving the need for SD-WAN.

At the partner summit this year, were there VARs and new kinds of partners in addition to the telecom agent partners in attendance?

Yes! It's not the old family anymore. It's dynamic, and existing and new partners are here learning about telecom products and what Telarus has to offer. When VARs start getting $10,000-$20,000 a month in residual telecom and managed services revenues, they won't be going anywhere. VARs are here trying to figure out that piece, and the traditional telecom/networking agents are here to learn about UCaaS, cloud computing, how to get into their customers with the right questions to ask, and how to use Telarus resources to help them do it.

What is the message you want partners to leave the summit with this year?

A lot of [partners] don’t know what our account management team is capable of and don’t know what resources they have to draw on. A lot of partners, surprisingly enough in the Telarus ecosystem, know very little about our tools, like VXSuite and now MoonRize. They are either not used to using them, or the last master they worked with didn't have them, so they are kind of living below their privileges.

Lastly, we want them to know about the team. If they need an engineer for things like hosted voice, our engineers are here to create relationships. So a lot of it is confidence building, and the team and resources that Telarus has put into play that agents can wrap their logo around and take it customer-facing. Our software development team and our tools are two areas where we stand out, as well as our customer-facing resources. We will go on a sales call and help close a deal and account manage on the back end with the client themselves. As our partners talk to us, it's almost like they are interviewing us for the job. When someone is touching your customers, that requires a lot of trust, but now, agents are saying that they either need to hire someone or use Telarus because they have to get back to selling.