TELARUS PARTNER SUMMIT — There were a flurry of emotions Wednesday as many partners saw each other for the first time in two years.

Telarus’ Adam Edwards

It was with much enthusiasm – and some relief – that CEO Adam Edwards took to the stage in San Diego. He thanked attendees for coming to the company’s annual Partner Summit, one of the first major in-person channel events since the start of the pandemic.

“I talked with many of you who were nervous,” Edwards said, recalling March 2020. “[You said] customers weren’t calling … we didn’t know how long this was going to go on.”

But as they have for years and years, the partner community adapted, Edwards noted. They learned new tools. They got more training.

Those moves didn’t just pay off during a pandemic; they paid off big time. The number of partners selling more annually with Telarus is increasingly significantly.

“We see [some] partners not just barely getting over $100,000 a year, but partners selling $200,000, $500,000, $800,000 a year. And those numbers continue to grow because the deal sizes are getting bigger,” said Edwards. “The opportunities are getting bigger, and these partners have invested — and are investing.”

Innovation

New chief revenue officer Dan Foster credited Telarus and its partners for being innovative over the past year-and-a-half.

Telarus’ Dan Foster on stage at Telarus Partner Summit 2021, July 28, 2021.

“Your customers are moving quickly,” said Foster. “The digital landscape has moved. … Our ability to innovate both in terms of tools and capabilities is critical for you to be successful in front of your customers.”

We all know the success many partners have had supporting businesses that needed work-from-home technologies. Agents and consultants who work with Telarus are no different.

Among the statistics Edwards shared, for 2020:

You see the huge spike in mobility/IoT. Breaking it down further, three of the service distributor’s 10 biggest deals last year had a mobility component to them. Moreover, Telarus’ forecasts for full-year 2021 show continued substantial growth in each of these areas.  And contact center as a service could wind up …

… showing the biggest spike over the next five years. Telarus expects partners will help its CCaaS sales to triple by 2026.

Telarus Partners

Rebecca Hink is chief operating officer with Eric Ryan Corp., a utility and telecom consulting company based in Pittsburgh. She and colleague Doug Hogue, vice president of business development, are Telarus partners.

The sales numbers Edwards presented on the big screen are in line with how Eric Ryan has been performing.

Eric Ryan’s Doug Hogue

“[Our] biggest sales have come from unified communications as a starting point,” Hogue told Channel Futures. “And then the rest is a talking point from there, when it comes to contact center, cybersecurity and cloud. Telarus positions us very well to know the basics and have the conversations to bring those offerings to our customers.”

Hink says like many partner businesses, the pandemic was only a brief hiccup. Customers quickly realized they needed the technology that companies such as Eric Ryan provide.

Eric Ryan’s Rebecca Hink

“We have a ton of hospitality clients, so we were very busy,” Hink said. “We might have had a slowdown in sales for a short period of time, but then when everyone started to anticipate things opening back up, [it got better quickly.] Of course, our corporate accounts, they were trying to get everybody up and running working from home. That provided us all kinds of opportunity.”

Richard Miller, another Telarus partner, listened intently to what the company’s execs had to say. Miller is CEO of Sandy, Utah-based Carrier SI. He says Carrier SI’s success has been rooted in a lot of advanced technology sales as well.

“We’re doing a lot of UCaaS, CCaaS and SD-WAN [sales]. … We come from being an Avaya diamond partner and transitioning premises-based solutions over to the cloud. The pandemic really fast-forwarded a lot of people who were dragging their feet to push into the cloud. So it really made our company boom at that point. We got a lot of customers moving that direction.”

Future of the Business

Like its partners, the last several months have been extremely busy for Telarus, which is battling in what has become an increasingly competitive arms race among technology and services distributors. In December, the company took a large equity investment from Columbia Capital to fuel continued growth. Then, in March, Telarus snapped up Philadelphia-based Chorus Communications, which bills itself as a consultancy and master agent. It followed that in June with the purchase of Comtel, which sells telecom and technology solutions via agents. It’s an aggressive stance.

“I believe master agents are at a crossroads,” said Edwards. “I believe they can simply be a passive entity, a banking function or an insurance vehicle, or they can be a value-added organization. That is a path we chose to walk. Because as a master agent, I believe we can help dictate that future through the investments that we make.”

Expect Telarus to do some more wheeling and dealing. Edwards says the company will take advantage of opportunities when they arise. As a result, opportunities for its partners “will continue to evolve.”