How do you help small and medium-sized businesses move their communications to the cloud?
And how do you make the journey as cost-effective for them and – importantly - you?
These are two burning questions for managed service providers, value added resellers and system integrators who see the huge SMB opportunity but struggle with the-often labour-intensive process and its challenging commercial return.
It’s not that the sector is indifferent to the transformative potential of modernisation.
The big enablers of enterprise over the last several years, such as Microsoft, are now eyeing the SMB market; building heavily-marketed entry-level solutions that encourage ambitious organisations to take their first steps.
Millions of those SMBs – so often the lifeblood of economies the world over – hear those messages, understand the benefits, and know they must act.
However, many lack the in-house IT resources and so look to outsource.
For MSPs keen to capitalise, the trick to making those multiple, smaller-scale deployments work is surely to leverage the efficiencies of automation and customer self-service.
And that means picking a provider partner with the right tools and the right expertise.
“SMBs typically contribute 50% to a country’s GDP so the global cloud-based voice and collaboration market is significant – the question is how do MSPs get into it profitably,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS, which has many of the answers.
“Historically, it’s been about providing and managing fairly bespoke PBX-type ’key’ telephony systems with, say, 20 telephones and multiple, manual processes and touch-points. It's been difficult for large providers to service that segment profitably.
“Today, those SMBs want and need more enterprise-style cloud-based collaboration and communication functionality such as VoIP, chat, virtual meetings and document sharing; all easily-consumed and paid for monthly.”
For many, it’s a Microsoft Teams play.
