Jostling for position
Mobile phone operator O2 has announced a further injection of two million quid into a fund that it claims is designed to help partners grow their business.
While the ‘funding' will be available to all members of the O2 network for the first half of next year, it looks more like a straightforward commission payment for flogging O2 contracts.
Here's an example given in the announcement: "For example, if a partner sells a BlackBerry smartphone connection then O2 will pay an incremental £100 per connection on top of what they are receiving already."
With 3G connectivity becoming increasingly prevalent in all mobile computing devices, we're seeing more notebooks and netbooks being sold through the telco channel. Additionally, smartphones are likely to be where a lot of tech growth happens over the next few years, so O2 seems to be positioning itself to capitalise on a lot of this via the indirect channel.
Ben Dowd, Telefonica O2 business sales director, said: "Our channel partners are critical to our success and we have a strong belief in them as a community. As such, we invest a lot of money each year supporting the partner channel and have seen the results of that investment in terms of constant and continuing growth."
A further carrot being dangled at the channel by O2 is the vow to hand-over customers it has acquired directly to its ‘centre of excellence' partners - by that read: tier one.
"Not only are we making a serious commitment to giving our current and prospective partners a fantastic incentive to secure more business in the first half of 2010, but we trust them so much we're giving them access to our customers. Customers want to be managed locally and our partners do a better job for them on a local level," said Dowd.
