Niche reseller Hydra has won a deal to improve the delivery of content for BSkyB's websites.

According to Hydra the deal demonstrates how resellers with the ability to add value to a deal can win over big companies.

"There were a lot of barriers getting in to talk to BSkyB because it is a huge company and we are only a small niche reseller," said Mark O'Hara, managing director at Hydra.

"But once we were able to get in and demonstrate our products and services it was clear to it the savings that could be made."

According to O'Hara the deal demonstrates why resellers should invest in in-house skills. "There is no point just being a mouthpiece for a distributor or a box shifter," he said.

Nick Watson, head of unified channels UK at Cisco, maintained that size is unimportant if resellers have core skills. "We think it is better for resellers to specialise rather than generalise," he said.

"We are trying to get resellers to do specialisations and we are working with them in core competencies, so even small resellers can win big deals in core areas."

Sky previously outsourced its content delivery to Digital Island, owned by Cable & Wireless.

The new system is expected to provide 300 per cent return on investment in its first year, rising to 2,000 per cent in the second, according to Hydra.

"There is no capital cost in year two, just services," explained O'Hara.

The reseller will use caching from Blue Coat Systems and content switching technology from Cisco to cut BSkyB's bandwidth charges.

"It was interesting working on the BSkyB project, behind the scenes of such high-profile websites," said O'Hara. "Due to the massive numbers of visitors to these sites everyday we couldn't afford for anything to go wrong."

BSkyB did not return requests for interview by time of going to press.