Ribbon Communications has always walked the walk when it comes to collaboration, and partnerships with key providers in specialist verticals and markets is essential — partners like Techland Systems in the UK.
Techland is a long-established Value Added Distributor, who has been working with VoIP gateways for the past 20 years. When Microsoft entered this market, Techland chose to focus their provisioning on the very specific niche of supplying their resellers with Microsoft Certified voice gateways and SBCs — offering UC voice hardware, software, technical support, installation and configuration services, to partners around the world.
As Gareth Nunn, Sales & Partnerships at Techland, explained, “We have a large loyal base of within the UK plus further afield, and when we started selling SBCs into the Microsoft UC space around 2010, Techland worked extremely hard to develop relationships with some very small companies at the time. Now many of these companies are among the largest Microsoft UC suppliers in the world.”
The synergies with Ribbon are centred around value alignment in serving those customers.
Nunn continued, “We have built our reputation on technical support and service, as well as installation and commissioning services. We conduct tier-one and tier-two priority support on voice gateways and SBC enablement. But when we do need to escalate a ticket to a vendor, we’re only as good as the support that vendor can provide. And these are voice-critical environments for our customers — any issues with vendors reflects very badly on Techland. That is why we work solely with Ribbon for our voice gateway provisioning.”
From Ribbon’s perspective as a global provider of real time communications software and network solutions, the explosion in recent demand for Teams enablement makes the need for reliable partner collaboration more essential than ever.
As Ribbon’s Channel Marketing Manager, John Ryan, says: “Techland is our only Platinum level partner in the UK and Europe, with global delivery capabilities [Platinum partners being certified technically to support and implement both the SBC Edge portfolio and the SBC Core portfolio]. They offer comprehensive coverage of the enterprise and service provider space.
“In addition, they have the expertise and skillsets to deliver, and help us drive continued market awareness of what we can do with our partners, as they provide a Microsoft Certified solution that is trusted by some of the largest technology providers in the world”
Some of those providers started small, but as Nunn explained, “There’s going to be a huge acquisition run in the next two or three years, with some big service providers picking up smaller voice providers. We want partners to know and feel comfortable that we’ve been there before — we can be part of that journey to handhold them in their growth with the technologies that Ribbon provides, to develop and grow their voice services and voice practices.”
With Ribbon’s forthcoming innovations including revolutionary offers such as SBC-as-a-Service (as recently announced at Commsverse), the pace of technical revolution is only going to increase into the future, and solid international partnerships like those with Techland, serving unique niche needs, are surely the way forward.
