Aussie Broadband is hoping a new self-service platform called Carbon will help differentiate it in the business market by enabling customers (and managed services partners) to provision NBN internet and value-adds like phone systems quickly and from one place.
Carbon is an “elastic interconnect platform” that was built entirely in-house by Aussie Broadband’s development team.
In the first instance, it will “allow users to turn on business connections at NBN-serviced locations within minutes, at the click of a button … whereas previously it would typically take months to order a service,” managing director Phillip Britt said.
While Aussie Broadband already provides online sign-up for enterprise NBN customers, Carbon “significantly extends this service to include more functionality and a much bigger scale,” he said.
As Carbon evolves, it will also be capable of spinning up more products and services, such as data centre and cloud connectivity, phone systems, SD-WAN networks, and IT security services.
“Ultimately, this is stage one of what is going to be a very interesting journey, I think, for all of us,” Britt told an online launch.
“What we were launching today is the business NBN side of things, and also Cisco Meraki. So they're the two things that are available today in the portal.
“There's a whole range of other things that we're going to incorporate in the portal over time [that are] already available today through the account management team.”
Aussie Broadband’s marketing and corporate strategy general manager Matthew Kusi-Appauh told the launch that Carbon was conceived about a year ago.
“The problem that we set out to address when we kind of came up with this concept - which has been probably six months in the works but we came up with the idea for 12 months ago - was a real frustration with the way that business services were delivered,” Kusi-Appauh said.
“Business services were very hard.
“It's always very hard to get in touch with account managers. You've got to get quotes, no one's got transparent pricing, and it takes a really long time - months and months - to get a service order and to get it provisioned.
“Then, every time you need to test a service or get it configured or those kind of things, you've obviously got to go back to a team who've got to come back to you.
“It doesn't just happen in real time. It's not easy, it's not simple.
“And so we really wanted to address that issue, not only in a way that's going to save you time and money, but also to provide a better experience: for our MSP partners and for our customers as well, and for the customers of our customers.”
Aussie Broadband said that Carbon would allow customers to apply configurations to their services “within seconds, as well as take advantage of single-click tests and diagnostics, real-time monitoring of bandwidth and data use, and centralised notifications, billing and support.”
On the NBN side, it will do this by linking directly into NBN Co’s business operations centre and surfacing ticket status directly in Carbon.
Carbon will also list all available plans and product prices.
