NWN Reports 'Strong' Growth Since Launching Solution-As-A-Service Portfolio
The solution provider disclosed that revenue surged 25 percent in the final quarter of 2019 following the rollout of the portfolio and an NWN-developed management platform.
Solution provider NWN is seeing that its big bet on solution-as-a-service offerings paired with an internally developed management platform is paying off, with accelerated growth in the quarter since the launch, NWN CEO Jim Sullivan told CRN.
In late September, Waltham, Mass.-based NWN, No. 76 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 for 2019, announced it was expanding its push into services by launching a new portfolio of solution-as-a-service offerings, complemented by an NWN-developed management platform.
For the fourth quarter of the year, NWN saw revenue growth of 25 percent along with a 33-percent increase in gross profit, the company reported.
"That's definitely ahead of where we planned," said Sullivan (pictured). Previously, "we had been growing high single digits, low double digits. So this was a big jump up for us in Q4,” he said.
NWN has 1,300 customers in the U.S., and counts Cisco and HP Inc. among its key vendor partners. The company's five integrated solutions are in unified communications services, managed security, contact center, Device-as-a-Service and advanced technology solutions.
The solution-as-a-service offerings are complemented by the NWN-developed Experience Management Platform (EMP), which provides enhanced business intelligence to customers.
Sullivan attributed the company's growth uptick in the fourth quarter to the "focus on the five core offerings" paired with the company's push around the management platform.
"The EMP story was such a strong differentiation for us," Sullivan said. "The close rate in Q4 was higher. And with Cisco, we had really high growth in all of our product lines with them."
That growth led NWN to achieve a ranking as No. 72 among Cisco's largest service providers last year, compared to No. 243 the year before, he said. Unified communications was the strongest growth area among NWN's offerings during 2019, Sullivan said.
Meanwhile, Device-as-a-Service--where NWN is focused on partnering with HP Inc.--has also been "really strong and well received," he said.
In Device-as-a-Service, "a lot of our work has been porting all of the EMP [capabilities] into that offering," Sullivan said. "And now the management layer, data analytics, the monitoring, asset tracking, billing, are all now integrated in the EMP with the HPI functionality as well."
Sullivan, a former executive at companies including EMC who joined as NWN's CEO last May, said the company ended up with "great adoption and great customer feedback" for the year as a whole. "Overall it was a really strong year for us," he said.