An interview with Telstra Wholesale

Group CEO and MD Greg Kennish offers Telstra Wholesale a snapshot of IntraPower.

Could you please provide an overview of IntraPower’s business?

IntraPower was established in 1998 and grew initially by providing small and medium-sized businesses the benefits of a national private IP network. The company has been listed on the ASX exchange since July 2007.  Today, the company is an innovative provider of IP networks and services and the leader in the provision of high-availability, on-demand Information, Communication, Technology and Telecommunications (ICT & T) services. The organisation serves more than 2000 customers nationwide.

At IntraPower, our goal is to build a trusted partnership with each of our partners and customers by delivering business solutions that allow them to focus on their core business. We see our role as their partner and supplier to create value and competitive advantage through delivering high-value IP applications over a reliable, secure network.

As the market for access products commoditises, IntraPower is leveraging this infrastructure to build value-add IP based solutions. These allow SMEs to access their entire IT infrastructure from the IntraPower Cloud. Gone are the days of running in-house or hosted IT hardware with the associated pain and frustration, capital expenditure, operating cost, and risk. IntraPower has innovated solutions that deliver a company’s complete IT, Data Communication and Voice needs from highly available data centres delivered over IntraPower’s high availability network. Unlike other products that only address part of the needs of an SME, the IntraPower Business On-Demand solution covers the complete needs of an SME.

What characterises value for IntraPower when choosing a supplier?

Our business is founded on a philosophy of innovation so we don’t look for suppliers but rather partners. And these partners must exhibit the same values that we strive for when creating value for our own re-seller and wholesale partners, namely:

• recognition that the partner owns the end customer relationship and must be fully supported at all times to protect this most valuable asset;
• superior and innovative products and services;
• flexibility of solution packaging; including the option of white labelling various product offerings; 
  unwavering commitment to operational efficiency;
• guaranteed reliability;
• a can do attitude of ’we will succeed by helping you succeed’.

What do you value about Telstra Wholesale’s products and services?+

There are the obvious answers: breadth of solution offering, network quality, network speed and reliability, as well as a commitment to doing what you say you will do.  But to a large degree all these are ‘table stakes’!
For IntraPower, we highly value Telstra Wholesale’s Account engagement which is broader than just product supply.  To provide you just two examples:

• IntraPower is poised to become the dominant player in a number of professional services markets, including: accounting, legal, employment, and financial services. Telstra Wholesale is a significant contributor via market research and solution validation, enabling us to deliver solutions that provide substantial return on investment to these clients.
• Our passion for operational excellence is matched by Telstra Wholesale’s. The account team’s work extends to offering innovation in other areas of our business, such as streamlining workflow, change management, and technology integration.

Where do you see your company’s growth coming from over the next few years?

Throughout the industry changes of the past few years, we have been able to positively respond to the market’s needs. The company has made appropriate acquisitions to capitalise on the rapidly evolving IP managed services sector, as well as creating new service offerings. These include SIP Connect and ADSL2 + data services. 

Providing these services has allowed IntraPower to consolidate its position with the small-to-medium ISPs. We see that the company will continue to experience further growth through these new service offerings. However with increasing competitive pressure, we need to continually build our partner and customer relationships through providing excellent customer service, remaining price competitive and providing customers with guaranteed reliability and performance in order to continue to grow.

What do you see as the emerging trends in the market?

There are two emerging trends that IntraPower is addressing at present:

• Small to medium ISPs, System Integrators and corporate customers are looking for a closer relationship with their providers to offer more customer service and data support.
• The industry is becoming even more competitive, meaning that the demand for excellent service, increased speed and mobility, as well as guaranteed reliability and performance, is increasing rapidly. 

What do you believe IntraPower will look like in ten years?

IntraPower has been able to stay on top of the recent industry changes and I ‘m confident we will continue to do so over the next ten years. I see that by doing this, IntraPower will still be a leader in the provision of high availability ICT & T services, no matter what product and service changes the industry experiences.

We will sustain a pre-eminent position in the supply of services to our focused market segments of Legal, Accounting, Employment Services and Tier Two Financial Services by providing the leading businesses in these segments with technology solutions that allow them to focus on their core business as opposed to deploying and managing communications and information technology.

We will have significantly grown our partner database and will be providing our offering to a much wider market. Despite our vision for growth, our core values will remain; a complete focus on Partner and Customer success.

Facts about IntraPower

• IntraPower provides telecommunication data services on a national basis direct to end-users via a range of integration and internet service provider partners to SME customers in metropolitan and regional centres.
• IntraPower services customers nationwide from our offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and through a national network of professional partners.
• IntraPower’s ADSL2+ and full range of business and residential grade solutions are now available in more geographical locations from a wider range of exchanges across Australia than ever before.
• IntraPower is one of only a few companies to provide wholesale supply of business and residential ADSL2+ data services and new innovative high-quality, low-cost services to Australian service providers.
  

  The anove interview was reproduced from http://telstrawholesale.com/enews/dec2009/customer.htm