BE Wholesale and CloudSense collaborate for Success

BE Wholesale, is a refreshing, imaginative and agile alternative to business broadband in the UK market. Since launching in 2010 on the back of the company's award-winning broadband network, BE Wholesale has established a reputation for providing reliable, high-quality broadband connectivity to its partners in the UK, allowing them the freedom and flexibility to offer end-users new bespoke services that precisely meet individual business needs. As growth in the broadband business has continued month on month, and with over 40 partners having joined BE Wholesale in the last 12 months, the company is actively developing further services, focusing on other 'last mile' access technologies such as Ethernet and Fibre.

In 2010 Chris Stening; a highly experienced leader in the ISP industry, joined BE as its Managing Director. After an initial examination of the systems underpinning the newly launched Wholesale business, Chris quickly concluded that they needed an effective CRM and robust system based processes in one solution across the enterprise. Chris was keen to replace manual records and spreadsheets and unify all customer information in once place but also provide a scalable platform to run the whole business on.

As a veteran Cloud computing user, Chris understood that Salesforce.com could provide a turn key CRM solution to BE Wholesale but most importantly would grow and develop with the business, "I knew we would quickly want to extend into BSS/OSS and Service Management. Salesforce was the logical choice as it met both our immediate and longer term requirements. I also knew that CloudSense could provide a unique blend of Salesforce and telecoms expertise that is unmatched".

CloudSense has a strong focus on aligning all its delivery activities to meet with business need. As such the first 'Sprint' in the BE agile-delivery was a deep discovery process to ascertain the wants and needs of the business and capture them as user stories. In subsequent Sprints, CloudSense was able to play the user stories – which meant designing and building the solution in constant close contact with the business users to ensure continuous improvement. Once built, CloudSense used playback sessions to capture the input of the business users and refine the solution.

Stening says "CloudSense take a practical approach to the projects they work on. It was great to have a small team, based in our office, maintaining a daily dialogue with the users but at the same time working in a controlled way using an agile methodology. With CloudSense I know that my team were going to get the solution that they needed and at the same time the Consultants will be clear on the process that has to be followed to ensure success..."

CloudSense rapidly implemented an end-to-end business platform, which provides a total view of the customer in one place. The solution design balances the need to unite all information in one location with 'hand offs' to human and system processes to complete some activities such as provisioning. Because the solution has been delivered in iterations, future plans now include integrating into the more complex fulfilment systems – but without slowing down the initial delivery. This approach ensures that both short and longer term objectives are met.

CloudSense also delivered its leading Order Management capability for guided selling, ordering and fulfilment at BE Wholesale. Chris concluded that "Because CloudSense offers the most advanced Order Management solution in the Cloud, BE was able to model even its most complex products and subscription combinations into a system that will allow us to upsell and innovate for years to come..."

CloudSense and BE are now partnering to embarking on a plan for continuous innovation and change and shared success.