Unified communications (UC) is providing enormous opportunities for the channel with industry experts predicting the market to be worth approximately £72 billion by 2023.
In light of this expected growth, and as increasingly more organisations wake-up to the importance of effective communication within their network, the channel is uniquely placed to capitalise. But if this is to be done it can no longer rely on just competitive pricing to appeal to the end-user:
“The UC market, particularly hosted telephony, is incredibly competitive. Historically, the channel has looked to gain advantage over rivals through pricing, which was partly driven by end-users applying a capital expenditure (capex) approach to hardware investment. The availability of cloud has changed that as organisations have looked to move from a model that is capex focused to one that is operational expenditure (opex) driven, spurred on by a demand for greater flexibility and bespoke capabilities amongst UC solutions.”
Gibbs continued: “In meeting this, the channel has had to adapt its own model requiring more direct involvement from the service provider and that in turn means a rethink to how it sells – from simple price driven, on-premise one-off sales, to a subscription based, solutions driven approach.
“There is a much greater emphasis on the relationship – the channel therefore needs to be much more consultative and in-tune with the demands of the end user. A huge proportion of their systems will be based in the cloud. In order to add-value it is imperative these systems are able to integrate with key services, whether it be your CRM system, Outlook or Gmail – by doing so you will have the capacity to integrate these items and other key tools within your daily working life under one, easy to use platform.
“For the end-user, having this ease-of-service is a vital differentiator and is likely to prove critical when looking to stay ahead of competitors and demonstrate a clearly progressive approach to UC within your organisation,” Gibbs concluded.
TelcoSwitch is exhibiting at the Convergence Summit South taking place at Sandown Park on 27th and 28th September and can be found on stand 25. Paul Gibbs is also taking part on a panel discussion looking at the ‘Rise of Contextual Communications’ taking place on 27th September at 1.30pm.