Looking back on 2020, Iain Sinnott, Sales and Marketing Director, VanillaIP, said the year was a little bit like being a part of the mission control team for Apollo 13. "It has been stressful, and not the year we planned for. Not even the results we wanted, but, like the film, we will look back at 2020 as a successful failure."
According to Sinnott, the group did have the chance to flex its skills and to showcase its technology by onboarding a lot of new customer applications back in March. Sinnott also said, one place that they were able to exhibit creativity was within Uboss – the multi-product, multi-vendor, cloud management portal used by VanillaIP partners and end-users. When it comes to partners, he added, the platform enabled them to quickly and efficiently deploy services from BroadWorks along with a range of other third-party vendors managed through Uboss.
"Some of our partners thrived in 2020, as they focused more on the key markets of mobility, remote working, and contact centre"
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Iain Sinnott[/caption]
He shared with me; partners who remained focused on PBXs had to pivot so they could address the dynamic needs of customers. In 2020, he continued, some of the changes the organisation saw are not exactly trends per se. He sees them more as impositions, which caused businesses to react to circumstances rather than focus on evolving as enterprises. "The imposition, however longer than expected, was long enough for people to realise the benefits of working from home and for companies to adopt new HR policies in 2021," Sinnott said.
The other big taboo, as Sinnott calls it, is our growing reliance on video conferencing. He said that the occasional appearance of a family member in the background and how we focus during a call where people can see us have become a normal part of our day. This, Sinnott says, paved the way for internal calls to move to collaboration platforms like Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Along with an increasing number of planned customer and supplier calls, Sinnott said they are now a multi-media event, driving what he describes as a nail in the coffin of the PBX industry.
Sinnott maintains that the organization had no issues with capacity, telling me: "The availability of the proper tools was a hurdle, but, Uboss stepped in, deploying 20,000 additional services for many of our customers within a week with no human or performance impact."
