It’s been well documented that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation by a significant degree. Businesses turned to technology as they looked for new ways of working and new ways to serve customers.
That’s not going to change. The post-lockdown business world will continue to rely on Zoom and Teams, on e-commerce and cashless payments, and on real-time collaboration among dispersed employees.
Any lingering resistance to cloud services has been broken by the pandemic, and businesses are likely to adopt new technologies far more quickly in future than they did in the pre-pandemic past.
A huge opportunity
This continuing digital transformation represents a huge opportunity for the channel, because connectivity underpins every businesses’ growing technology stack to a greater degree than ever before.
A few years ago connectivity was important, but by no means as crucial as it is today. Back then, if a company’s internet connection went down its ISDN-based telephone system would remain fully operational. Today, a dropped connection will take the company’s VoIP service down with it.
Similarly, it’s not long ago that CRM and invoicing tools would sit on a server in head office. Today, they’re more likely to sit in the cloud. Without a solid internet connection, video calls stutter and freeze, and e-commerce sites grind to a halt.
In other words, digital transformation doesn’t happen without resilient connectivity. There’s never been a better time to talk to customers about the options available to them, from dedicated leased lines to full fibre broadband.
Do they need 4G backup, SLAs offering 100% uptime (or money back), or specialised homeworker solutions? Connectivity has never been so vital, but customers won’t necessarily know what they need in terms of speed and resilience until you talk to them.
The three pillars of digital transformation
After that, resellers can widen the conversation to take in what might be considered the three most critical telecoms services. Just as the pandemic has demonstrated the importance of resilient connectivity, it’s also shown that many businesses would struggle to operate without “anywhere” communications.
That means telephony and omnichannel services that employees can access wherever they are, whether that’s in the office, at home or in the coffee shop round the corner.
A switch to flexible working has created a vast market for cloud-based telecoms and unified communications that combine voice, video, chat, email and more in a single package.
At the very least, mobile workers should be able to make and take professional calls from anywhere, on any device. That flexibility to communicate and collaborate away from the office might have been a “nice to have'' before the pandemic. Today it feels like a necessity.
Bolting doors
After connectivity and communications, the third critical telecoms service is security. Just as you wouldn’t build a new house without putting locks on the windows, no business should start a digital transformation journey without bolting the back doors to its data.
That will require a next generation firewall at the very least, but businesses with more sophisticated digital ecosystems would be better off with a unified threat management package that combines firewalls with web filtering, data protection, application management and more.
These three pillars - connectivity, voice and security - are the foundation stones of every businesses’ digital transformation. As companies emerge from lockdown, they’ll be wondering how to turn the temporary measures they adopted during the pandemic into more permanent solutions. For channel businesses, it’s an opportunity to position ourselves at the heart of the digital transformation process. Let’s start talking to customers now about the connectivity, communications and security that will form the backbone of their digital futures.
For more information on Vaioni Wholesale, please visit our website or get in touch with the friendly Vaioni Wholesale team on 0161 672 9900.