Unify has focused on reducing the time and requirements for partners to begin selling in order to achieve a faster time to revenue. Today, 80 percent of the partners that Unify on-boarded in the last 12 months are already actively selling.
New specialisations were added to the Unify Partner Programme to help further differentiate and grow business in new markets, including the Health Station HiMed Specialisation that was made available in December 2015. Additionally, Unify has made its large enterprise OpenScape portfolio available through distribution, enabling partners to access these solutions quicker and at a lower cost.
Training and certification updates are another area of ongoing investment. Additional training courses are now available online, with all OpenScape Business training courses accessible via the web, helping to reduce travel costs and time. Unify has also reduced the large enterprise certification requirements 50 percent, resulting in less investment for taking VUE certification tests. In total, between 20 and 56 days of required training have been eliminated by combining implementation and support certification requirements. Additionally, 11 authorised training partners have been added to Unify’s training portfolio, bringing the total global number to 17.
“Our team is excited about the opportunity to work with Unify and Atos more closely, said Brian Gendron, vice president of Large Enterprise Sales, Black Box Network Services. “It’s inspiring to see Unify remain so dedicated and responsive to the channel in a time of immense change. We’re excited to see what’s in store for the upcoming year and beyond.”
Unify also introduced new tools and offerings to make it easier for partners to grow:
•A new configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool delivers a seamless, automated solution for the design, pricing, proposal and ordering process. This user-friendly, SaaS-based tool provides a simplified interface for partners, thereby accelerating the sales cycle and reducing the complexity and time needed to produce Unify solution proposals. This reduces partner’s total operating costs for selling Unify products.
•New guided selling methodology and workflow integration to request special bids and technical approval are now available.
•A new OpenScape Business software bundle offering to support customer requests and full solution selling approach.
“Through Unify’s annual Voice of the Partner survey, we suggested a number of enhancements to the partner program – mainly simplification and improving certain processes. We are delighted to see our views have been listened to,” said Michael Brase, managing director of Telba GmbH , Germany. “In particular, we are looking forward to the benefits that the new configure, price, quote tool will afford our business. Not only will it speed up our sales cycle and streamline current processes, but it will also free up time that will allow us to focus on winning more business.”
“The new OpenScape Business promotions that were presented at the conference are very compelling – they will enable a smooth upgrade path to the latest version and via software support our customers can be confident they are benefitting from the latest features,” added Iain Simpson, managing director of Active Voice and Data.