Going ‘Full-Service’

ARG chief strategy officer Randy Jeter has returned to the partner side of the channel at what he says is just the right time.

More than 15 years ago, Jeter was president of Premiere Worldwide, a fast growing agency that was racking up awards from Intelisys and looking to scale. However, Jeter said he felt the limitations of the agent model at the time. He wrote in a 2009 blog that if the channel wanted to become “indispensable,” it would need to buck the stereotype that agents always sold on price. If the industry were to truly grow, agents would need to evolve into “true full-service brokers.” 

But the shift wasn’t occurring as Jeter saw it. Partners simply weren’t selling advanced services.

“The biggest issue that I had fundamentally was that the space wasn’t ready, because the space was really only selling circuits,” Jeter told Channel Futures. “It wasn’t selling SD-WAN, it wasn’t selling UCaaS, it wasn’t selling cloud, and it wasn’t selling apps. It wasn’t selling any of the things that I felt like you needed in order to get into the channel and build a long-term profitable business.”

When a customer asked him where they could place $30,000 monthly recurring revenue in cloud hosted services, Jeter was stumped. There was nowhere he could source the deal. The deal helped inspire Jeter’s vision of building a managed cloud services provider. He went on to lead RapidScale, which he later sold to Cox in 2018. 

“You had to have more of an array of services to source in order to scale. Hence, RapidScale was born out of a need for the channel,” Jeter said.