Back in September, the Bicom Systems team joined FONIA, our exclusive product distributor for France, at IT Partners. It was our third time attending the two-day show, and, as always, it did not disappoint! In fact, IT Partners is the first tradeshow the team has attended since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Keep reading to find out key highlights from the show!
HOUSEKEEPING
The show is at the beautiful Marne La Vallee in Disneyland Paris, France, and we share a booth with our partners, FONIA. FONIA exclusively distributes to European Francophone countries such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium.
“Our desire is to provide our partners with reliable, quality and inexpensive solutions to guarantee their satisfaction.” says FONIA.
On top of the FONIA team, a few Bicom Systems team members were present.
Director/Director of Sales and Marketing – Stephen Wingfield
Business Success Manager – Patrice Bramat
Head of Products – Aida Jamak
Deployment and Training Team Coordinator – Azra Hadzic
Support Team Coordinator – Ankica Omerčaušević
Product Owner of CEV Team – Martina Filipović
If you have any questions for them or were at the show and want to connect, send our business success team an email and they will get in contact with you!
AT THE SHOW
Over the two days at IT Partners, our team collected more than 200 qualified leads! Not to mention, each lead signed up for a trial system to get familiar with all the features and benefits of our solutions. We also demonstrated the latest version of PBXware, gloCOM and gloCOM GO V6.4. Within the update, users can find new features for chat, meeting, and conferencing.
Aside from the excitement of new features, a common theme we heard at the conference was that the attendees were actively looking for an alternative solution to what their current providers were offering. Three main comments stuck out to us.
“I understand you have a true Multi-Tenant solution that can host 200 tenants on one single instance?”
Bicom Systems does have a true Multi-Tenant solution!
A Multi-Tenant solution is capable of handling multiple customers (tenants) on a single server. A multi-tenant solution is the most competitive if it is a hosted model. It is the most competitive because the actual software your customer will be using is not the ‘tenant,’ your customer’s actual software, but their server is.
A Multi-Tenant solution shares the same resources with all of its tenants. For both resellers and customers, there are many benefits when implementing a multi-tenant function. Bicom Systems PBXware Multi-Tenant edition enables you to increase efficiency in the workplace and transform the way you conduct business in the same way the other editions do.
“My company is looking for pricing consistency and stability for my current customers. This is something I do not have with my provider.”
Bummer! Consistent pricing and stability are crucial for resellers in the telecommunications industry. Especially if they are just starting or scaling their business, it can be challenging to make a name for yourself in the industry when your provider keeps changing prices.
At Bicom Systems, we do not publish our prices. Rather than focusing on selling products to consumers, our focus is developing top-of-the-line solutions for our partners to sell! Therefore, making our prices public information would compromise the ability of our partners to earn a higher margin.
For the last sixteen years, we have offered perpetual pricing of licenses. If you are not familiar with the term, it is the traditional model used to purchase software. Our partners pay for the software licence up-front and have the right to use it forever!
“It is unknown to me how the strategy of my current provider will evolve. I need to rely on a partner with a clear channel position who will not contact my customers directly.”
It is unfortunate to know that there are resellers out there unhappy with their providers, especially for avoidable reasons. Transparency with our partners is vital to the company and something we will constantly keep doing.
A few things we have done so far:
A safe space for all Bicom Systems partners to connect, share ideas on best practices and product usages, discuss topics, and, overall, create a community. Partners will also learn exclusive news regarding bug fixes, product releases, and feature requests.
Productboard is a third-party solution built on an idea from product management systems to help organizations get the right products to market faster. Using productboard helps our team with product discovery, provides a better understanding of our partner’s needs, allows our developers to prioritize what to build, rallies everyone together around one road map, and so much more!
Every quarter the Sales and Marketing teams organize a ‘We’re All Ears’ campaign. It gives our partners a chance to ask questions to specific teams, Heads of departments, and even our CEO. Questions can range from products, features, selling tips, marketing activities and more. All the information is saved in an online library for partners to go back and check.
NEXT YEAR
The team is excited to get back to IT Partners 2022 with the gang from FONIA. We are looking to dedicate areas for demos of SERVERware, PBXware, and gloCOM solutions. In the future, you can expect FONIA to expand the Bicom Systems market share significantly in France! Stay tuned, and don’t forget to follow us on social media to see what our team is up to next.