ARC Telecoms has officially entered the competitive South African telecommunications space with the aim of targeting its technologies, services and consultancy at the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) market.
Speaking at the opening event in Rivonia today, Arc Telecoms CEO Steve Briggs said SMEs form the heart of the South African economy.
“It's the 50- to 200-person businesses that employ the majority of our people and contribute the majority of our GDP, and yet it remains a massively under-serviced sector when it comes to telecommunications services,” said Briggs.
Briggs explained that there are a few giant telecoms companies servicing the enterprise space and lots of smaller ISPs all wishing they could. Consequently, he said, the true economic powerhouses of the South African economy - medium-sized businesses - get lost in the gap between the very small and very large.
According to Briggs, Arc is not aiming to service the top 500 corporate companies, nor is it focusing on working with one-man home office businesses. “Rather, we have designed our network, services and support to talk to the needs of the IT manager of medium-sized companies with infrastructure, an IT budget and often more than one office location,” he said.
Arc will offer a no-strings-attached 14-day trial of any entry-level connectivity or voice service to businesses.
Speaking at the same event, Brian Neilson of research firm BMI-TechKnowledge said ARC would fill the gap that exists in the local telecoms sector in as far as SMEs are concerned. Neilson highlighted that local SMEs spend about R15 000 a month on voice while using roughly R5 000 on data (Internet).
Neilson said that according to BMI-TechKnowledge research, local SMEs only have basic voice and data services. “However, very few have virtual private networks, if they do it's probably 'DIY' and only half of the SMEs use any form of outsourced hosting services while their least cost routing solutions are mostly found in SMEs,” said Neilson.
The Arc Telecoms leadership team owns 50% of the company while Alan Knott-Craig's investment company, WOA, owns the other 50%.
With over 100 customers and agreements with significant local carriers such as WBS, Telkom, Neotel, MTN and Vodacom, Arc also has the support of its advanced technical service delivery partners, Neology and Think IT.
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