Forty-year-old infrastructure and services provider Black Box Network Services has come a long way from reselling networking hardware through a catalog.
 
With its roots in the infrastructure space, Black Box - No. 35 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 - recognized the value that adding a telecom overlay would bring to its business, and since the early 2000s, the Pittsburgh-based provider has been laser-focused on growing a telecommunications business, said Todd Thomas, director of carrier services.

"Our goal is to see a 20-percent uptick from last year in carrier services, and next year, we'll lift that up another 20 percent for carrier services," Thomas said.

[Related: Black Box CEO Takes Sales Force To Task]  

(But earlier this week, Black Box said its revenues for the second quarter of its 2016 fiscal year were down 5 percent, to $237 million. The company also lowered its full-year expectations to a range of $920 to $930 million from $965 to $980 million.)

As customers begin to adjust their buying habits to embrace a pay-as-you-go model, traditional VARs must also rethink their go-to-market approaches. Customers still enjoy having a trusted technology advisor; that hasn't changed. So the more products and services a solution provider can bring to the table, the more valuable it will look to customers. And the convergence of IT and telecommunications is creating an opportunity for VARs get into carrier services sales.

But getting into the telecommunications game doesn't happen overnight. Black Box began building its own telecom practice through acquisitions. In the early 2000s, the provider scooped up several tech companies with carrier services practices, such as Converged Solutions Group, LLC. and Nortech Telecommunications Inc., in an effort to grow its product mix.  
 
"As a company, we saw the value in providing the end-to-end-solution," Thomas said. "But without [carrier services], we weren't going to be that all-encompassing solutions provider."

Moving away from or adopting a new selling model can be a challenge, especially for startup solution providers that don't have a nest egg. Selling telecommunications -- services sold through a residual model -- wasn't hard for Black Box because it already had its legacy hardware resell business in place. These transactional sales helped tide the provider over until its telecommunications business caught on and commissions began to come through Thomas said.