intY says that as the channel looks to accelerate its adoption of cloud services, resellers and service providers can immediately take advantage of the growing market for cloud-based UC through reselling intY’s bundled voice, data and UC solution either 'out-of-the-box' or tailored to specific needs.
Chris Baldock, managing director of intY, explains, “Demand for integrated business tools that enable users to communicate from anywhere in a cost-effective and secure manner is huge. Add to this the economic drive toward OPEX and on-demand IT services, and UK businesses are clearly cloud-ready. In launching this new service, we are helping to make sure our channel partners have the solutions in place to meet current and future demand.”
The cloud-based service incorporates hosted Microsoft Lync 2010 and hosted IP PBX to deliver a secure, scalable, and easily managed email, messaging and collaboration platform complete with business-grade voice. Critically, the new UC service can be fully and seamlessly integrated with intY’s current portfolio of Integrated Online Services including cloud-based Microsoft apps such as SharePoint and Exchange and intY’s own web, desktop and email security services, all delivered to the customer in one bill.
This multiplicity of services enables partners to rapidly bring on-board, and scale, tailored cloud solutions on demand in order to provide end-users greater economies of scale and convergence across their entire voice, data, collaboration and applications infrastructure.
Baldock continues, “Offering Unified Communications from the cloud is a no brainer for the channel in terms of expanding existing portfolios and securing recurring and new revenue streams. However, the capital cost of setting up and managing a high performing hosted environment with the high standard of vendor technologies required has kept this out of reach for many channel players. Opening up intY’s enterprise-class services portfolio and high-density data centres to these providers creates a level playing field for both channel and end-user.
“Previously the domain of large enterprise customers, the new service opens up UC-as-a-Service model to mid-sized enterprises, thus increasing the market opportunity for the channel. At the same time the integration of best of breed technologies will enable end-users to further consolidate their infrastructure and simultaneously realise greater collaborative and efficiency benefits as a result. It’s win-win.”