THE SMALL AND MEDIUM-sized business market has become a crowded place.
All of the big companies have said in the past months they see this market as a place to find big growth. Rogers, Bell, Shaw, Cogeco, Telus et al – all have talked about how well they hope to do in the SME space.
So is there room for small startups like Syntagma Network Services? CEO Theresa Carbonneau thinks so. The company’s small business plan offers a full suite of voice over IP-delivered services including broadband connectivity, voice services, e-mail and web hosting, exchange server hosting, virus scanning and fire walls, and secure remote backup.
Carbonneau (pictured below) had the idea for the company as a Telus executive over a decade ago, she said. What follows is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Syntagma’s CEO and Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: How old is Syntagma?
Theresa Carbonneau: A baby. Not even a year.
GOB: Where did you get the name from?
TC: Well, I’ve had it registered for quite a while. When I left Telus more than 10 years ago now. But I used it for this company, for this particular start-up from last September. It has a meaning. It means the smallest meaningful element of a construct. And the implication is that you’re only as good as the weakest link. So in a network you obviously have very small components and very large components, and the network is only as good as the smallest one.
GOB: All right. You spent some time at Telus obviously, but what else is your background?
TC: Consumer marketing – market research starting in Europe – and industrial and consumer goods, and I moved from there to telecom just before the deregulation hit in the mid-’80s, and have been in telecom ever since.
GOB: With?
TC: British Telecom… In fact, I was one of the first few employees of the British Telecom Enterprises, which was their non-regulated arm, when that started out. Obviously, it’s been through all kinds of changes since then, but I was there for five years.
I came to Vancouver and worked for DMR, which was a Montreal-based systems integrator. And I was on loan to BC Hydro setting up a distributed network, and that’s how I met people from Telus and BC Tel, and they hired me.
GOB: You had done some research into sort of what’s become Syntagma while you were at Telus, right?
TC: Oh, yes. I did a couple of things there. The reason I was hired by BC Tel, which is what it was then, was the need to justify a fibre optic build throughout the province, and I had done something similar in the UK with BT to accelerate the what was then the London fibre ring, which was a fibre build out around the City of London. I did the business case for that, and that became the advanced network in BC. I did a couple of other things (like) pushing DSL.
GOB: What are Syntagma’s immediate goals?
TC: Well, the immediate goal is really to provide small businesses with complete packages based on IP communications for voice and data that until now only large corporations have been able to get. And by that I don’t just mean the Centrex-type services, but the ability to manage applications on their LANS, on their existing IT infrastructure without necessarily having to incur huge IT management costs. So it’s bundles that go from integrated voice and data, telephony end data, telephony end Internet to managed IT outsourcing, but it’s specifically at the small-medium business operations.
GOB: Do you see this as a crowded market, because a lot of the cable operators and telephone companies, and many other providers in Canada have been saying they see the small and medium business market as where they can really make some hay and do some really big things.
TC: It is. And I think that the key strength that a smaller player has, like us, is the responsiveness and flexibility. Certainly there is a need, and I think that’s why those larger players have been making noise about this market, but whether or not they can provide the responsiveness is another question, so that’s really where we intend to focus.
GOB: Now what about long-term goals? Are you beginning regionally, or going nationally?
TC: Actually, we’ve partnered with a Toronto-based company, Pathway Communications, an Ontario-based ISP. It’s the only ISP in Canada that’s ISO 9000 certified and it’s a very strong little company that has some great people.
We’ve gotten it to launch our first consumer service… that has just launched this month, and we’re actually working on some promotions right now for both Vancouver and Toronto. That is a kind of a corollary of the small-medium business service, because the platform is the same. It’s a Centrex switch, a soft switch that provides telephony services, and we’re assuming that small business’ own employees also are consumers, so we’ll be offering packages to employees and to families the VoiceCool brand.
GOB: So the VoiceCool brand is meant to compete in the Vonage and Primus VOIP space?
TC: It provides the same sort of service, yes. I think we’re priced better than Vonage or the larger players, because again we’re smaller and we can.
GOB: So what are your regional rates then?
TC: We have $15, $30 and a $60 bundle, depending on what you need, whether you just want the long distance, or whether you want two-lines, one-line, and various long distance packages to different regions. We’re pretty competitive. You look at the tariffs and you look at the bundles – and that’s assuming (the customer has) a broadband connection, though.
GOB: Right. Now your competitors, the larger competitors, they talk about bundling, which includes video and wireless. How do you sell your service to customers in the face of the overwhelming bundle, bundle, bundle marketing pitch?
TC: It’s difficult. Certainly Shaw, for example, offers cable TV, plus the phone, plus the Internet. And there’s no way we can compete with that. The thing is, again, do you want all your services from one supplier? Are you happy with that one supplier? Not everybody is. Either we give up and let them take the whole market, or we say there is a proportion of the market that does want a different type of service. We’re going to satisfy that demand.
GOB: On the business side, the additional part of the bundle which Rogers and Bell have, for example, is wireless service. Is that an impediment to what you’re doing right now? Are you finding that at all?
TC: Actually no. One of our promotions that we’re coming out with we’ll have a wireless component.
GOB: Is that something done in partnership with other wireless companies?
TC: We’re assuming people already have wireless connections, so they can do certain things with their wireless phones. We’re also partnering with a company that has a WiFi network, so those services will be available over that WiFi network.
GOB: Are they available now, or soon?
TC: This is something that we’re working with them on. The WiFi network is in place, yes, and there’s lots of hot zones that are available around. But no one has sort of connected the dots yet.
