Microsoft Teams recently reached 115 million daily active users. In fact, the platform’s gained a considerable audience throughout the pandemic; jumping from 75 million daily active users to 115 million in a matter of months is no small feat. It does speak volumes about the kind of stronghold the company has on the collaboration market, too.
Although Coronavirus has presented companies that develop collaboration tools with various roadblocks such as outages and security concerns, our reliance on said tools shows no signs of slowing down. According to Iain Sinnott, Sales and Marketing Director, VanillaIP, the collaboration marketplace has shifted toward relying on a distinct blend of communications tools along with styles of working, creating the ideal conditions for the likes of Teams to thrive and further dominate the collab market.
“Project working from dispersed locations across the globe lends itself to the use of Microsoft Teams, which is why tools like Teams have begun to find a realistic position in the workflows of small businesses”
Corporations, he added, have already perfected this model, however the COVID-19 crisis has proven that working from anywhere is not only possible but, rather, some tools are more effective at enabling working from anywhere. It is now more popular, practical, and acceptable to use such tools, in fact.
“Microsoft Teams is one of the best enablers of team-based work, especially when you consider it over traditional telephony”
Individual products like Dropbox’s shared repository for documents and Asana for project management want to maintain their current market share. And Sinnott argues that channel partners who provide a combination of these best-in-class technologies will likely experience a lot more growth than those who do not. “Over the short-term, Microsoft is best understood by customers, and its product is easy to set up as companies of all sizes migrate to Teams,” according to Sinnott.
Over the long term, Sinnott contests, Microsoft could control the whole process directly. “If partners only handle telephony, it seems obvious that the defense of maintaining that relationship could become more difficult.” This, he adds, as Microsoft dives deeper into its phone licenses with the purchase earlier this year of Metaswitch. The relationship should equip them to handle call management and general PBX features. Microsoft could then have a stronger telephony and team collaboration proposition. To Sinnott, this leaves partners and all other stakeholders involved in the process, between a rock and a hard place.
As it stands, Microsoft’s strategy is beneficial for customers, as the functionality they crave gets delivered by the collaboration giant. Sinnott continued, the short-term outlook – this gives channel partners some direction, but over the long-term, it could be easy for Microsoft to strip away the middleman. “Resellers can look at this in a more positive light, knowing there is revenue in all these composite products.
Partners will have to continue to tell their customers how to build the best-in-class collaboration solution needed to ensure continuity. They will also have to convey the value they bring to the table. Localized support, deployment, updates, and pretty much any other issues get handled by local partners. This is not the case for cloud giants – they do not have localized support in many instances, which is one principal reason one might assume channel partners might never be obsolete.
