John Linton I had a meeting yesterday with a possible new supplier to Exetel and as he was from the USA, and he was such a pleasant and knowledgable person, we had a quick lunch together after our formal meeting had ended. As his company's proposal to Exetel involved some considerable expense on our part and the solution we were/are considering is, to say the least, "cutting edge" much of our discussion had centred on the risks involved and how it might be possible to reduce those risks. We may have reached a mutually agreeable solution on accepting a revised proposal from them based on them accommodating the several requests I had made, and Steve in previous discussions, had made to mitigate what we saw and see as significant business and financial risks to Exetel.
As his company is attempting to deal with Telstra and Optus (as well as several other carriers/providers) in Australia our lunch time conversation extended to talking about how the much larger carriers in Australia were making it even more difficult for small ISPs (such as Exetel) to find new ways of competing to address future offerings. He made the point that 'risk taking' is a key advantage for a smaller company and we agreed that, at least in Australia, taking risks was probably the only remaining advantage a smaller company has in today's Australian communications marketplaces.
Scary thought.
Being on the sales side of his company, albeit at a very senior level, he was optimistic about his company's chances of providing his solutions to the very largest of Australia's carriers with whom his company had been dealing for at least as long as they had been talking with us. He made the point that he was nowhere near as advanced in the discussions he was having with Telstra, Optus and AAPT as he was with Exetel although his company had put far more effort in to their contacts with them (as they obviously should). He also made the blindingly obvious point that he would never get to talk with any senior executives within those organisations but was dealing with the lower technical levels who were extremaely conservative and ultra-cautious in looking at actually doing anything 'new' and involved them in any uncertainty.
As I understand the situation, the solution that Exetel is considering is already being installed by a very small ISP (of whom I had never heard until an engineer from their company mentioned the name a week or so ago and I subsequently looked it up when I returned to the office) who clearly is more open to taking risks than Exetel is or, as probably, has management that see through the difficulties I'm having problems with more clearly or, perhaps, has a lot less to lose and more money than we have. In any event it does illustrate the point that small ISPs can and almost certainly must take risks that larger companies will never consider doing. That has certainly been true in the past in many instances for Exetel and not the least of those was our decision to adopt the Allot Net Enforcer technology in late 2006 to smooth out the bandwidth required to deliver P2P sourced traffic to our customers - a very courageous decision at the time when we were the first ISP in Australia to buy that particular solution. Of course now many ISPs have bought the Allot solution or similar products from Allot's competitors now that Exetel has "removed the risk" and it is no longer regarded as a risk to do that.
What a lot of sheep there are in this industry!
I don't like the thought that taking risks that others are too cautious to take is the only true competitive advantage left to Exetel - however it may well be true.