Partners can not solely rely on big vendor solutions to grow in the post-coronavirus market as businesses adapt to new workplace norms.
That is the advice of Keith Jackson, Director of Channel Sales at 8×8 (pictured, above), who said that growth for resellers will not continue in a post-COVID world without specialising in a service or educating themselves on every facet of a vendor solution, adding “partners need to have something else in their back pocket.”
“As much as I’d like to say that the 8×8 platform is good for every environment, it’s not, we fit in most situations, like Office 365, we satisfy 90% of every customer’s requirement”
“But that’s where the resellers need to differentiate because 8×8 won’t fulfil every requirement a business wants. If resellers are focussing on Azure services, Azure won’t be able to facilitate every requirement so partner’s need to make sure that they educate themselves.
Whether that’s through the master agency community, who can train partners on all the technologies on a platform, or they pick two solutions per vertical that they can specialise in. That way they can give real pragmatic answers to customers and offer solutions that tick more boxes.
Partners need to learn to adapt, learn that technology changes, learn that every customer’s requirement is different, and make sure they’re positioning the right platform because there’s more players in the market. There’s a lot of people that are moving into the collaboration space from the IoT space, and if you’re trying to do the same stuff you did five years ago or even a year ago now, in the new world and the new norm, it’s not going to be successful.”
New solutions
Speaking to UC Today, Jackson said that 8×8 themselves have had to change the way their employees work, adding that it’s London office is soon to be transformed from “dead space” to a customer satisfaction centre.
Looking forward, the channel director predicted that businesses will now focus on enabling a mobile workforce and argued that that is where partners’ priority should be.
“Some of the product technologies that are going to really skyrocket will be in the endpoint security side of things because none of us are going to be on private networks anymore. Yes, you’re going to have a VPN secure connection but you still need to encrypt the data because it’s sitting in somebody’s home.
The SD-WAN side of things and how people shape their traffic around the globe now is going to be a hot point. Considering that traffic is coming into residential connections, businesses need a way of managing that connection and making sure they get the right flow data.
Then the collaboration piece and the contact centre piece is just going to keep getting bigger. But I think the partners that are multi-product focused and have got specialisations like doing the connectivity piece, mobile, security, collaboration and contact centres, they’re going to thrive. The resellers that are single point will battle and they need to evolve quicker.”
