ispONE Joint Managing Director Zac Swindells offers TWNetwork a snapshot of his business.
Can you begin by providing us an overview of ispONE?
ispONE is a provider and market developer of premium wholesale, business and residential Internet products and services for the demanding Australian Internet Service Provider industry. Its vision is to help small Internet Service Providers (ISPs), current Internet resellers and new Internet entrants into the ISP market compete and grow in the marketplace.
ispONE does this by continually developing and evolving its extensive range of wholesale solutions including the latest and best-of-breed back-end systems. ispONE offers an inexpensive managed ISP solution for small to medium ISPs, and resellers. ispONE incorporates a unique product offering called BOSS which represents a complete outsourced web based management system including an online web based billing platform, provisioning, reporting and ordering system.
What characterises value for ispONE when assessing a supplier?
- back-end synergies to ispONE systems
- implementation and delivery
- ability to adapt to ispONE’s changing needs
- national presence
- proactive instead of reactive approach.
What do you value about Telstra Wholesale’s services?
- ability to easily integrate into ispONE systems
- timely service delivery
- dedicated resource and escalation paths
- product availability on a national scale
- availability to provide infinite growth.
Where do you see ispONE’s growth coming from in the next few years?
- converged communications
- home hubs and UMA technology
- Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO)
- brand name operators
- utility operators.
What do you see as some of the emerging trends and threats in the market?
Trends or future predictions of a wireless market as opposed to fixed static market:
- real-time targeted marketing online
- peer-to-peer to be a marketing and advertising medium
- mobile handset GPS based target marketing
- mobile broadband access as fixed broadband replacement.
Threats to the way traditional ISPs operate a business now as opposed to the future are the same as the trends outlined above. Fixed line, static broadband providers and infrastructure builders are at the biggest threat from the mobile network owner operators of Australia. The ability for the mobile network operators to increase capacity, speed, delivery to market and points of sale presence, far outstrip any current ISP operators. All the major device manufacturers are building the device for the wireless world and not the static.
What will ispONE look like in 10 years?
ispONE will still be in the wholesale world but with a focus on the mobile delivery platform along with wholesale delivery platforms for brand names, online marketers and advertisers. It will be a wholesale business that focuses not only on the Australian market but on a global wholesale platform. It will allow brand name operators, which will be the new wholesale customer, to deliver services to a multitude of countries with a single delivery point of aggregation. The aggregation will be that of consumer data and not the data we are accustomed to today.
Facts about ispONE
- wholesale-only provider to 150+ ISP customers
- only seven staff to manage whole of business
- only Wholesale Quality Assured Telecommunications company in Australia
- Deloitte ASIA Pacific Top 500 Technology Company for last two years
- six years young.
