Small and mid-sized businesses rejoice, CounterPath Communications, a global provider of award-winning solutions in Unified Communications, recently announced that it has expanded it’s Stretto Collaboration portfolio with a new hosted service. The hosted offering aims to support CounterPath’s rapidly expanding team of channel partners, with video conferencing and virtual meeting room services available across Europe, North America, and other key markets.
Although the CounterPath collaboration solution was originally designed to target large enterprises with an existing on-premise offering, the new hosted Stretto software takes a different approach. This SaaS solution will provide improved scalability to companies in the highly under-served SMB space.
Serving Smaller Companies with Collaboration
Although almost three-quarters of all smaller companies relying on VoIP according to IDC, only around 36% are currently using UCC. Reasons for this discrepancy include higher operating costs, lack of scalable integrations with existing systems, and more. CounterPath is addressing the common issues that hold today’s SMBs back with an affordable and reliable hosted offering that also includes APIs for customisation and integration with existing SMB systems.
According to reports issued by Component, the global market for enterprise collaboration is expected to grow to around $36.86 billion by 2023. The report notes that the small business market is also one of the most likely to adopt cloud-based solutions for communication and collaboration, to help with reducing software, hardware, and deployment costs.
EVP of Sales, Product, and Marketing at CounterPath, Todd Carothers, said that the business can see a lot of opportunity in the SMB market for UCC so far. The company has sold UCC via the direct sales team up until this point but also wanted to deliver the offering to the channel too. After listening to the feedback from their channel partners and customers, CounterPath decided that a scalable SaaS solution was the best route forward.
A Positive Path to the Future
According to CounterPath, the evidence of early successes among its channel partners prove that the company has made the right decision with its new hosted and managed service. CounterPath has chosen .e4 Strategies as its initial North American partner, thanks to the company’s customer reach and technical depth. Additionally, CounterPath has been the unified communications partner of .e4 Strategies for more than five years, according to the Principal of .e4 Strategies, Michael White.
The extended offering from CounterPath makes the company a perfect fit for .e4 Strategies’ open source PBX customers who want to add more collaboration and unified communication features to their offerings, without unnecessary stress.
