The communications industry has transformed considerably over recent years. The traditional market model has been altered by new entrants to the industry in the form of aggressive over the top providers and cloud giants. Resellers and service providers have been required to change their go-to-market approaches to remain relevant and competitive.
Even after changing their modes of operations, channel centric providers may still be at a disadvantage when they come up against larger competitors. Unity appears to be the best way for smaller providers to ensure their voices are heard within and increasingly crowded industry.
During Vectors 2019, SkySwitch’s annual user conference, the inaugural meeting of the Cloud Voice Alliance (CVA) took place. The CVA has been formerly launched at this year’s event – with the support of white label platform provider SkySwitch – but is completely independent and is open to new members who operate potentially competitive platforms.
UC Today spoke with the CVA’s Executive Director, Jeff Dworkin, to understand more about the group’s structure and objectives. Providing its members with tools, cutting edge technology, consolidated buying power and industry visibility the CVA hopes to aide its members so that they can be as successful as possible in the rapidly expanding UCaaS market.
“Our mission is to give our members – the local UCaaS providers – a real voice in the industry. We want end customers to know that they don’t have to go to a giant UCaaS provider when they can get better products, solutions and service from some of the great local providers out there.”
Often smaller local providers can legitimately out perform larger multi-national providers when it comes to feature sets, business benefits and cost effectiveness, but cannot when it comes to marketing. Large international providers often spend a huge proportion of their revenue on aggressive marketing strategies that smaller local businesses cannot match. Making customers aware of the benefits of using local providers will be one of the key aims for the newly formed CVA by providing power in numbers.
“Together we represent 450 resellers, who represent 200,000 seats of UCaaS users in North America. Suddenly this group has enough presence to really gather attention of vendors, legislators and customers.”
Customer service provision is also a crucial factor, often the large national cloud providers operate self-service models which can leave customers confused and without support. Local providers and resellers must be able to leverage their locality and specific regional, or vertical, knowledge to overcome the competition. Members, operating locally-owned hosted PBX and UCaaS platforms, will be able to utilise the CVA’s structure to share best practices and agglomerate resources in ways designed to help each member increase its profitability.
CVA membership is available to any providers who enable cloud based voice services in North America, although plans for potential geographical expansion have not been ruled out. Memberships of varying degree are available through a number of different subscription options.
SkySwitch – as one of the leading providers of white label UCaaS solutions to channel members – is supporting both the launch, but also the continued expansion of the CVA at this year’s Vectors. The success of its partner community is obviously critical as SkySwitch operate a channel only supply model. Eric Hernaez, President and Founder of SkySwitch, explained why this arrangement makes sense for both parties.
“SkySwitch is happy to host the CVA at Vectors 2019 and put the organisation, and the supporting service providers, in front of our reseller base to enable the CVA to gain momentum and broader awareness,”
To find out more about Vectors 2019, you can visit SkySwitch’s official conference website, and follow Vectors 2019 and UC Today on social media to keep up with all the news from the event.
