Recently, I had the fantastic opportunity to attend the Cloud Comms Summit in the USA for 2019. The event is always an incredible place to learn about the current trends in the marketplace and explore the opportunities facing today's vendors, service providers, and resellers.
To discuss the paths ahead for service providers and resellers in the current cloud environment, I caught up with Iain Sinnott, the Vice President of Sales at UBOSS. The UBOSS brand, part of DRD Communications is a cloud management ecosystem that works alongside BroadSoft platforms to assist service providers in exploiting as much power as they can get from BroadWorks while adding additional value and functionality into the mix too.
As service providers and resellers strive to differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace, solutions like UBOSS allow today's competitors to offer a unique end-to-end service for their customers, covering everything from customer portals to billing. Here's what Iain had to say about what he had learned from the Cloud Comms Summit this year.
What's a Key Trend for You at this Year's Summit?
A massive trend at the Cloud Comms Summit both this year, and in the recent years that I've attended, has been the growing need to differentiate in a time where most communication platforms offer similar things. I asked Iain if he had also noticed a growing need for service providers to provide a full portfolio of products, even if it meant working with a multi-vendor strategy.
"Ultimately, you can either go with one brand and hope that they win the communications race, or you can begin to pull the best in class options from a range of environment and deliver the best package you can for the market that you're selling to. That's something we've seen for a while here at UBOSS"
With the UBOSS offering, today's service providers can build their own approach to communications, picking the differentiation opportunities that suit them. Another trend that Sinnott said he had noticed this year was the growing demand to put customer service at the head of all decisions.
"Today, the end-customer experience is vital. Automation and the simplification of adding new products and tools for a customer are crucial at this point. This means that we're moving into an environment that's a lot closer to the kind of cloud we've always wanted. Service providers aren't just offering a pack of features anymore; they're focusing on really finding the solutions that address the problems that their customers have."
Differentiation Challenges
As the communication landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and differentiation becomes challenging to achieve, not every service provider is coming out on top. We've already seen some wobbles from companies reselling Avaya solutions, for instance. I asked Iain what his advice would be for the channel partners that are struggling in the current environment.
"You're looking at relationships here that have been successful for a very long time. These channel partners have a relationship with a vendor that they've had success with before, and a relationship with their maintenance team to think about. It's difficult to let go of those connections."
