Product Development company IQ Hive have found a unique niche within the massive mobile services sector which has transformed the nature of their business.
IQ Hive modernises and automates IT systems and processes and now find themselves dedicated largely to One New Zealand, one of the key network providers in the country.
“We started managing projects with them, small to medium size ones, but then started to pick up larger ones and now all of our business is predominantly with them in the wholesale sector,” says Alex Vaz, Product Manager at IQ Hive.
It’s all about what could be called white labelling when a company purchases a generic product and rebrands it as their own to sell.
“What One New Zealand has noticed is a growing desire for other “non telco” companies to get into the mobile service space, which is very expensive to set up, as you can imagine,” he says. “There’s a lot of infrastructure, like cell towers, huge servers, a lot of overseas contacts to enable international capabilities”
“One New Zealand already has all the right infrastructure so they work with us and we created a layer that provides a seamless integration into their infrastructure so OneNZ customers can utilise the One New Zealand network and they can sell their own branded version of OneNZ’s mobile services,” he says.
“Our platform sits on top of those services, so when their wholesale customers come to them with just a brand such as images, some website copy and colour guide, we give them an entire platform that allows their customers to purchase sim cards, buy plans and manage the services – all branded under a customers brand which ultimately uses the OneNZ network.”
“A lot of people have amazing customer bases and would like to expand to mobile services. Anyone can do that now.”
Overseas, in countries like India, there are thousands of mobile services providers. Essentially New Zealand is getting into the game happening overseas where the market is adopting more and more players, which OneNZ and IQ Hive hope to work together to champion.
Business is growing with the successful launch of both MightyMobile – Mighty Ape’s new mobile brand as well as Contact Mobile, the mobile service belonging to one of NZs biggest power providers – Contact Energy.
Watch this space!