Everything We Shared at Comms Vision 2024

First up from PXC, delegates heard from our CEO James Smith. In a sponsor interview, he shared his personal journey to becoming CEO, looked at our strategy for the coming years and shared exactly how PXC is ‘doing things differently’. 

James told attendees, “I joined TalkTalk Group as CFO towards the beginning of 2023 with two key projects – to deliver the business separation which saw the creation of PXC and to re-finance the balance sheets remaining between the businesses.” 

“When we were here last year, we introduced PlatformX as our new identity. This year we’ve been trading fully as that and during the summer our shareholders and chairman asked me to become CEO. With a strong platform now to grow this business, I’m excited to go on this journey with our partners”. 

“PXC are the only UK scale aggregator platform, aggregating last mile connectivity with Openreach and alternative fibre networks. We see ourselves as differentiated in being that platform of choice and through the innovation of our products and services which you will learn about over the next few days.” 

Exploring the FTTP Rollout

James’ interview led nicely into our first boardroom which looked at FTTP rollout across the UK. Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Neil Wilson brought together a panel of experts from CityFibre, MS3, Openreach and Virgin Media Business to explore the benefits of working with different fibre providers on this journey. 

The panellists discussed the challenges and opportunities they’ve experienced regarding FTTP rollout, with a key challenge in the business world being the ability to persuade end users to switch from copper to a more future-proof product. A consensus among the panel was that there needs to be more education around the benefits of FTTP and ethernet vs traditional copper broadband – with full fibre offering businesses more reliable internet speeds – cheaper, and ethernet offering additional business-grade services like faster SLA’s and dedicated bandwidth.  

Andy Wilson from CityFibre said the challenge on upgrading legacy services is an educational one and Guy Miller from MS3 agreed, saying: “If you get to have that dialogue, whether it’s the fact that upload speeds are far better or that copper is down on average 8 hours more than fibre a year – how much does that cost you as a business?” He believes the fear factor to overcome is the perception that this new technology may not work when businesses already have copper connections that do. To overcome this, he said “there are things we, as businesses can do, like parallel running that might give people the confidence to switch.” 

The issue around FTTP adoption wasn’t just with end users. With a cheaper product to sell, it seems some resellers too need convincing. Neil said: “You’re going to have some people that want to step from ethernet to FTTP and as a provider you can either take the revenue hit and keep your customers or the revenue hit of your customer base because eventually, you’ll lose all the revenue if you don’t.  

It’s a question of revenue vs margin but if we can bring an EO product to market that allows us to build value on top of FTTP with stronger SLA’s and fix times – we can build margin back into the product.” 

Our Boardroom Discussions

Next up, Head of Cloud and Security Sales Lee Walker led our Seizing Growth Opportunities in Cloud and Security boardroom, which explored the challenges in these markets and how to overcome them, plus the advantages we can expect.  

For us, when we look at cloud services, we talk about the stepping stones of adoption that enable our partners’ customers to move at their own pace and adopt the right solution for where they are on their journey, using a strategic approach.” Lee discussed how our solutions such as Colocation, Cloud Exchange and our VDC platform 1Cloud, are designed to suit different customer journeys and help businesses overcome core challenges in the market such as the ability to secure customer environments in hyperscalers and deal with challenges around unpredictable billing resulting in bill shock – to name a few. “We know these problems are causing businesses concern at a time when managing cashflow is a challenge which is why we’ve designed solutions that can help businesses of all sizes overcome them” he said.  

Lee also delved into the world of network and cyber security which is becoming more complex and threatening to businesses without reliable solutions in place. “We work with world-leading security organisations to provide cost-effective wholesale specific offerings that work for different businesses. For example, we’ve recently launched our fully managed DDoS mitigation solution using NetScout’s Arbor platform where we are helping partners capitalise on a growing market opportunity without the need to invest in expensive hardware, removing that high barrier to entry. When it comes to cyber security, we have platforms like F-Secure which focus on securing consumers and home workers, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office for our SoHo customers and Cyber Protect Cloud for our mid-market and enterprise customers. We also have a number of other security solutions we’re bringing to the market imminently, which we urge partners to speak to us about”.   

Our Partnership with Zoom

For our next boardroom we heard from Director of Voice Sales, Graham Kedzlie who was joined by experts from Zoom to showcase how PXC are enabling the channel to consume Zoom’s 22 products in a wholesale motion, underpinned by automation and API integration to make the experience as frictionless as possible. 

Graham kicked off explaining why we’ve chosen to partner with Zoom: “Zoom have a clear roadmap of what they want to achieve, and AI and customer experience are at the forefront of this. They’re also automating the operational lifecycle for partners which mirrors the PXC approach of being easy to do business with and, their commitment to working through the channel fully aligns with our principals. Over the last 12 months PXC has widened its Zoom partner offering by launching Wholesale, Referral, Bring Your Own Carrier and Professional Services. We’ve also spent time simplifying our price books and next year all of our partner interactions will be executed entirely through 1Portal utilising Zoom’s API ecosystem.” 

Our most popular boardroom gave delegates the opportunity to really get to know our CEO and put their questions to him, as we opened the floor and James was asked to delve a little deeper into our strategy. On this, he said: 

“The diversification we’re now able to offer in aggregating fibre providers, and the cost advantages that brings to our partners’ customers is a core part of our strategy moving forwards. We’re also looking at how we can work more closely with partners in more strategic ways and, how we can better differentiate our offerings in doing this. We’re really looking into our product set to bring more innovations like our Zoom partnership, our cloud and security portfolios, and enhancing our connectivity with more complex offerings that suit more strategic environments. For the future, it’s really about doing what we already do, but better."

It was a packed schedule for PXC at Comms Vision 2024, and we enjoyed every bit of it.  

To learn more about PXC’s latest products and service innovations, click here.