Just as enterprise organisations must decide which cloud technology to implement into their workforce or pick a central collaboration hub for their team – service providers and channel partners in the UC space must also make and execute strategic moves that shift customers across platforms or from one cloud to another.
Support to Win has developed a suite of platform and PBX migration services that removes the complexity and resources needed to manage the transition for both the service provider and their customers. They are one of the leading companies providing the foundations for the current “Switching Culture”, standing out in the communication industry by giving channel partners, service providers and other businesses the support they need to migrate customer bases between technologies. We spoke to Simon Burckhardt, the Chairman of Support to Win, to learn more about platform migrations in the age of the cloud.
Who are Support to Win?
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Simon Burckhardt[/caption]
Support to Win is the managed services company born out of Train to Win, enabling the channel to adopt new technologies, win more business and consolidate services without distraction from their day-to-day business. And while Train to Win delivers telecoms-specific training to the telecoms sector (using their market and vendor expertise to provide a wide range of courses across sales, customer service and regulation), Support to Win offers the necessary telephony support and operational services which some telecoms companies have limited resource and/or expertise to deliver themselves. This ultimately enables Support to Win’s clients to win business and focus on the sale.
Support to Win's go-to-market approach is along the lines of ‘Business as Usual’ operations, which includes everything from managed service provisioning to ongoing in-life support, and a dedicated Projects team that focuses on migration projects and ad hoc consultancy-based work.
“Most recently, and most interestingly for the growth that we saw in 2019, is the arrival of migration as a crucial product”
According to Burckhardt, during 2019, most of the evolution of the Support to Win brand came from the demand for migration services that help businesses move from on-premise into the cloud, or migrate between cloud platforms such as BroadSoft BroadWorks and Asterisk. “Some companies find a new cloud space that simply serves their needs better, while others need help to get all their customers onto the same environment after a merger or acquisition. Support to Win is uniquely positioned to help, due to our independent and agnostic approach to multiple vendors and platforms. We have years of experience across many platforms, drawn in part from the immense training heritage from the Train to Win business. This allows us to truly understand the gap between all the technologies customers are migrating to and from, and help our clients bridge that gap swiftly and safely.”
Cloud-to-Cloud Migrations
Although many people would assume that the biggest migration journey for businesses today is from on-premise to the cloud, Burckhardt told me that the Support to Win company actually deals more frequently with cloud-to-cloud migration. The revenue for the business more than quadrupled in 2019 thanks to cloud-to-cloud migration.
“A lot of things can trigger a cloud-to-cloud migration. Most of the reasons are positive. For instance, a merger or acquisition could require a business to bring newly acquired customer bases together on the same platform, so they can create the full value of the acquisition by realising synergies of only supporting one platform. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of changing strategies and trying something new. Some people are deciding that BroadWorks and BroadSoft platforms are no longer the right routes for them.”
In Vonage, the company where Simon was UK Managing Director before working with Support to Win, there was a large migration that took place in 2019, which involved moving away from BroadWorks and onto Vonage’s own IP-based cloud, Vonage Business Cloud. “This was a huge project for us, and it was based on the belief that customers would be better served by everyone using the same product. Support to Win proved to be an invaluable partner to Vonage in managing that large customer migration, ensuring customers were kept satisfied and churn was minimised.”
