Telenor Norway this week announced that they in partnership with Telenor Group’s Cloud service subsidiary, Telenor Business Internet Services, are teaming up with Microsoft to offer Microsoft Office 365 and Lync bundled with Telenor’s communication services. Parallels made tangible execution among these groups possible.

 

Parallels partnered closely with Telenor in their Cloud project. Telenor will deploy Parallels Automation, a comprehensive service delivery system, and will work with Parallels broad ecosystem of cloud services providers that are APS certified to build a comprehensive offering. They will use Parallels’ expertise in defining winning go-to-market strategies.

 

In their announcement this week Telenor Norway communicated that the first order of business for them was to develop a channel outreach and enablement strategy that could be executed in conjunction with launching their first service, syndicated Microsoft Office 365.  Telenor already has an established channel serving over two million subscribers in Norway and Sweden, so it was relatively easy to reach the channel.  The objective though was to find a compelling value proposition that this channel could easily sell.

 

As it turns out, one of the key differentiators of Telenor’s Office 365 service is that its telephony services are fully integrated into Lync Online from Office 365.  Therefore, it was relatively easy to excite the channel with this highly sought after value-added service.

 

It became a matter of enabling the channel with proper training to ensure that affiliates could support Office365 effectively for their respective subscribers – and make a decent profit doing so.  Microsoft became a valuable partner in this regard, while Parallels software remains crucial to the provisioning, billing, and self-service enablement of the services.

 

The next step for Telenor is to expand this program to their subsidiaries across Europe and Asia.  They could make this expansion only with Parallels Automation, as it is the only centralized system that can coordinate across all subsidiaries using Microsoft’s MOSI interface as well as provide comprehensive support for a multi-channel sales motion.  We’ll update this blog post as Telenor evolves their program.