Nebula Global Services is encouraging resellers to make the most of opportunities in the physical security market after signing its first vendor partnership with Verkada
It is a good 35 minutes into Technology Reseller’s meeting with Richard Eglon, Chief Marketing Officer of channel services company Nebula Global Services, before the topic of sustainability crops up – and even then Eglon has to be prompted. For Nebula, which has made sustainability a key differentiator, this is quite a turn-up for the books.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Eglon is any less passionate about ESG (more on that below), it’s just that there’s lots else to talk about, notably Nebula’s first vendor partnership, with physical security specialist Verkada.
Vendors are an untapped market for Nebula, which provides channel services to resellers, VARs, MSPs, global SIs and distributors. However, it is one that is likely to become more important in the future, with Eglon looking to add one or two new vendor partnerships each year.
While a direct relationship with a vendor represents a new approach for Nebula, Eglon is keen to point out that it won’t affect the role of resellers and distributors in Verkada’s go-to-market.
“Verkada is an AI-enabled, cloud- based physical security company offering everything from surveillance through to vape sensors inside school toilets.
The surveillance market is a huge growing market, but from a technology standpoint most of it’s being delivered through local, alarm-based companies, one man and his van, who will go out and install it. The issue with that is it’s sub-scale,” he explains
“Verkada are selling lots of product out into the market, but to do that efficiently you need to do a site survey. In a college, for example, you might have a mix of sensors, door entry systems, cameras and you will need to know where your access points should be. You need someone to do a site survey, write a report and say ‘right, this is the product range you need and this is where it needs to be located’. That’s fine if you’re doing one college locally, but what if the client has a group of colleges across the UK? You then have to find 20 different ‘one man and his vans’.”
Which is where Nebula comes in. After carrying out Verkada projects for the likes of Softcat, DMS Digital and some international businesses, it has just been onboarded by Verkada as a global, authorised Premier Services Partner.
This will allow it to project-manage, install and service Verkada video security cameras, access control systems, environmental sensors, alarms and intercoms on behalf of resellers, who as a result will be able to serve more customers and increase their involvement in a market that Nebula expects to grow by 400% to 500% globally over the coming years.
Go to market
Eglon says one of the good things about the partnership with Verkada is that it dovetails with the vendor’s existing go to market.
“Even though we’re engaging with Verkada direct, all deployments of the service we provide are done through resellers and those resellers are still buying through distribution. Distology is good at getting product out to the market quickly, efficiently and they’ve got tried and tested go-to-market plans to do that. We are a bolt-on to that. Where they’re selling product, we’re almost like a services distributor. They’ll have skus for the product line and we’ll have skus attached to that based on day rate deployments.
So we’ll say ‘to install those 100 products, here’s your line item cost’. Then we’ll say, and this is what’s quite new to the market, ‘Once it’s installed, how will you support that product? What if somebody knocks the camera in the warehouse, what if there’s a fault which is not just a simple swap-out issue?’.
“Verkada will do an RMA (return merchandise authorisation) to the customer site to take back the faulty part, but the customer’s not going to get their facilities manager to go up in a cherry picker and swap out that part themselves. What we will do, for a minimal cost, is give you a three-year services wrap, which will be person-to-site. We will guarantee to get somebody to the customer site the next business day to swap out that part – very much like what’s been happening in the network and server space for many years. Verkada may be offering their partners an AI-enabled, cloud-based service offering, but you still need somebody to go and physically install it and support it.”
What Eglon finds exciting about the partnership with Verkada is that instead of just dealing with the reseller market, Nebula can now engage with Verkada at source and help them to define their services plan and shape their go-to-market.
“What tends to happen with channel services is that third party maintainers service the reseller/MSP/GSI market and deliver a service on their behalf to the end user. They very rarely engage with distribution or vendors, because quite often a vendor sees them as competition, because they also try and do that end-of-life break-fix piece.
“At Nebula, we now have a complete end-to-end bolt-on across the entire channel, where we’re adding value at every touch point, not just at the end where a lot of the other channel services players are. That becomes a differentiator and once we’ve proved we can do it for Verkada, we can branch out with other vendor relationships, maybe helping a US vendor to go to market across Europe or an AsiaPac vendor deploy to the US. It makes no difference to us, because we’re geography-agnostic and technology-agnostic.”
He adds that resellers benefit because by providing them with services to sell to their customers, Nebula is enabling them to get into the annuity-based services market, which can help create value within their business.
“If that business is on an exit path, they might want annuity-based services attached to that to get their multiple up. That’s one option. Another is they just want to have a more strategic partnership with their end user client. We’ll help them with that too.”
Strategic relationships
Eglon says that because Nebula wants to become a long-term strategic partner to its customers, instead of just selling four days of installation, say, it starts by asking what success for them looks like and works back from there.
“We’ve just on-boarded a new partner, a nationwide reseller, and deployed a big project across a number of colleges in the North-west. That all started with us asking them what they wanted to achieve and discovering that as well as selling Verkada, they sell Cisco, they sell HP, they sell Dell, so we said let’s consolidate everything on the network and any hardware into one support service. That opens up the opportunity to go out to market and have a conversation about who’s supporting your Cisco, who’s supporting your server storage. We then go and help them sell that. Obviously, we give marketing support and collateral, but for us it’s more about our time, because a services business is really its people. You’re selling site consultants and specialists in what you do.”
Nebula’s people are around 25 full time employees and a global network of 7,500 fully assessed technical experts that it can call on to deliver its channel services in 167 countries globally. It uses about 1,000 of these month in, month out, calling on the remainder when it needs to scale or deliver a service in a new region.
Eglon estimates that about 70% of Nebula’s business is UK-based, but says that in the last 18 months, most of its growth has been in overseas deployments, some for UK-based business.
“We’ve just finished a project with a Cisco MSP, Ampito Group, which wanted a Cisco deployment across about 20 sites for a financial institution in the US. The distributor could ship the product
but didn’t have the skill sets to do the services and implementation piece, so we took control of that. We took the product into our facility in Tampa, Florida and then deployed it out to those sites,” he explains.
ESG focus
Having experts in the field all around the world is a key element of Nebula’s ESG strategy, which it has worked hard to make an essential differentiator.
“Our purpose is to source local, source responsible, source ethical. And what we mean by that is using our extensive network to deploy people close to the customer site, because that provides a better outcome generally and keeps money in that community.”
To achieve its ESG goals, Nebula is currently, in Eglon’s words, ‘knocking down a bungalow to put up a luxury hotel’ i.e. building really strong foundations to support ongoing improvements. These include working towards ISO 14001 certification (it already has ISO 9001 and 27001); implementing initiatives like carbon offsetting of travel by its engineering team; producing a Sustainable Business Report; and adopting a social value calculator that applies a monetary value to things like the work Nebula does with its local food bank, Share Wokingham, creating a framework and mechanism for continuous improvement.
“For us, sustainability has become a real differentiator. We onboarded a partner in the UK, which is aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the conversation I had with them was purely around sustainability and what our credentials were. That’s where the conversation started. That was the first live example of where we’ve onboarded a customer and got that customer engagement purely through our ESG strategy.”
Future plans
ESG will continue to be a focus of Eglon’s in the next 12 months, including EcoVadis accreditation.
Following a successful financial year, with annual revenue up 45% and profit growth of 170%, he is also keen to maintain commercial momentum by expanding Nebula’s vendor services portfolio and by bringing out a suite of managed services that a reseller/ MSP can upsell and cross-sell to their existing market, such as engineer- only maintenance and on-site maintenance vouchers.
“These are voucher-based, like a pay as you go consumption model, which enables people to flex a bit more, rather than be tied into a three or five-year contract. They can almost be a foot in the door because the end user client doesn’t have to commit too much on day one. Then, once they see the value of on-site maintenance, the reseller can say ‘You’ve had this activity over the last 12 months. We might as well put you on a 12-month contract now, which will give you more value’.”
With its ESG experience, Nebula understands the value of creating a differential and, in a challenging market, looks certain to launch many more initiatives and services to help it and its partners, now including vendors, stand out from the competition.
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