Meridian Delivers Wireless Solutions For Courier Firms

For Meridian IT Solutions, the partnership is taking the company beyond its specialty of providing networking, wireless and security solutions to the banking and financial markets into new vertical-market opportunities, said John Freres, president of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based solution provider.

And by bringing software-focused solutions to the table, Meridian IT Solutions hopes to garner more opportunities by entering the sales conversation much sooner, Freres said.

"If the applications have already been selected, at that point we're just there kind of sitting on the sidelines after the decisions have been made," he said. "[With this partnership] we're moving ourselves closer to the application side of the business."

Sidewinder, Coppell, Texas, provides software packages that schedule, track and optimize delivery and service routes to help customers make the most of their resources in the field. It has molded its software into several packages targeted at various markets, including ServicePlatform for the field services market and DispatchExpress for the courier market.

"We can come in and provide any of the infrastructure resources, from the networking to the servers, even overlaying the security required as they start to open up applications in this sort of a mode, to be able to go ahead and provide even the professional services and the consulting around it. So it's really the enabling application that starts to drive the business need," Freres said.

Meridian IT Solutions' partnerships with vendors such as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Symbol Technologies have all been brought to bear as it builds Sidewinder solutions, he said.

Meridian IT Solutions is also able to tap its security expertise to help customers as they deploy wireless solutions, Freres said.

"The reality is that by putting in different policy-driven solutions or technology-driven solutions, we can actually make the wireless [network] more secure than the wired," Freres said.

Couriers or service technicians in the field can utilize Sidewinder's software via wireless devices such as PDAs or data-capable cell phones coupled with bar-code scanners to log deliveries or service calls as they're made, said George Best, president of Sidewinder N.A.

"Particularly in the field service arena, PDAs are pretty much a requirement because there's a lot more information that technicians have to gather and carry with them, maybe information about the service call they're on or service history about the machine they're working on," Best said. "In the courier industry, most are independent contractors, so there's no need to have expensive devices. They can use Nextel or any mobile phone that can have data sent to it."

Coupled with such wireless devices, Sidewinder's applications give customers a realtime view of their field operations, Best said.

"If you get an emergency service call, for example, our software could figure out who should be dispatched—who has the right skills and right equipment to go fix that particular machine," Best said.

Together, Meridian IT Solutions and Sidewinder have already tackled a handful of customers over the past year, including Diamond Courier Service in Philadelphia and Transportation Management, a courier service in Los Angeles that employs 150 drivers and handles about 5,000 jobs per day, Best said.

By leading with the Sidewinder applications as it targets such customers, Meridian IT Solutions is forcing itself to adapt its sales strategy, moving away from the traditional "speeds and feeds"-type of salesperson, Freres said.

"What we're really looking for are salespeople that have a real sense of what's driving the business within the business, and because of it, we're out actively looking at new ways of training our people in the solutions-selling arena," he said.