Selling telephony? Selling IT? Want to sell both?
There was a time when the two worlds were separate. Today, thanks to game-changing cloud technology, Managed Service Providers and Value-Added Resellers must have an offering which responds to all of businesses’ myriad communication needs.
That’s voice, messaging, email, web chat, social media, even video.
Then add the need to integrate it all with go-to communication and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and the like, and it’s easy to see why the changed face of the MSP/VAR landscape is more nuanced than ever before.
That said, increased revenue and profit opportunities are of course there for those able to put together (and support) a compelling, all-encompassing offer. All they must do is partner with a channel provider that not only intimately understands voice, but also Microsoft, and of course the reseller model on which it also depends.
“Five or ten years ago there was a clear dividing line between those who just sold and supported telephony and those who specialised in IT – now, it’s all managed by customers’ IT teams, with a different language being spoken and a different relationship required,” says Mark Herbert, Unified Communications and voice integration specialist at Dstny for Service Providers, whose award-winning Call2Teams solution is just part of a powerful wholesale ecosystem that delivers big.
“Critically, we're now seeing the mainstream cloud IT providers such as Microsoft Teams offering users a voice service. That has had a major impact on the channel. There used to be reseller specialists in on-premise voice PBX products, and then others who played in the server and workstation services space.
Today, there is a new breed of partner which sits in the middle, and which has solutions and a level of expertise to capitalise on that new market’s huge opportunities.”
The continuing rise of Microsoft Teams in particular is at the heart of this new world’s potential to provide smart MSPs and VARs – no matter their size – with a business model upon which to build a thriving future.
“Our voice partners can enjoy significant success by wrapping their core services around Microsoft Teams,” says Herbert. “Teams offers a relatively competent phone service but still has deficiencies, so why not bring added value to it? The end user still gets that business-critical calling experience, but also benefits from access to all the other rich functionality provided by a powerful Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solution. Microsoft is spending billions of dollars on marketing so why not benefit from that? It’s like standing on the shoulders of a giant.”
In the case of Dstny for Service Providers , its channel partners get a premium, margin-rich Teams voice-integration, that can be white-labelled and that is easy to sell and easy to support.
