Brennan IT opens doors to resellers again

Six years after closing the doors to its last wholesale program Brennan has turned to the channel, but this time telco and infrastructure services were on the menu.

Brennan has appealed to resellers for its managed services that includes servers, backup and storage. Brennan's two high-availability data centres in Sydney and Brisbane have 30 percent and 70 percent capacity respectively available.

The provider has seen its managed services grow 200-300 percent in the past 12 months, said Dave Stevens, managing director. He predicted it would grow from 5 percent of revenue to 15 percent within 12 months.

"There's a land grab going on now" for customers in outsourced infrastructure, said Stevens, who added that customers, once signed, were likely to stay on for a long time with their chosen provider.

Stevens said more mid-market companies were willing to outsource their data to managed service providers. Potential customers were convinced by Brennan's track record of stability, credibility through references and strong financials.

Brennan was targeting system integrators, secure document and data carriers, and other managed service providers.  

Other managed service providers were running out of balance sheet and could not borrow more money from the banks to take on more customers, said Stevens. Brennan could put in a private link and rent out its spare capacity to other providers.

"It wouldn't be odd for us to spend $400,000 to $500,000 on capex to bring in a good-sized client," said Stevens.

Resellers could customise the managed services by sending their own invoices, rebranding sales information and taking first level calls. Companies with little experience in selling outsourced infrastructure, such as secure document companies, could sell the services on a referral basis.

Brennan was looking for resellers that wanted to convert one-off revenue from selling hardware to services-based recurring revenue. Resellers "need to stop selling hardware nad start selling services. Their revenue should dip but net margin will grow."

Attached revenue in the form of telco services could double the revenue from an infrastructure-as-a-service deal, said Stevens. Brennan is seeing strong demand in telco services such as WAN, internet connections, and voice and data.  

Brennan was hoping its channel partners would bring in 5-10 percent of revenue within 12 months.