An international-grade hosted telephony solution based within the United Kingdom, thevoicefactory, or "TVF" takes a unique approach to the world of Unified Communications. Their aim is to deliver advanced hosted solutions to verticals within their specific field, by selling 100% through their trusted partner channel.
Though TVF was born in the UK, it now offers hosted UC to more than 72 countries and owns a global BroadSoft platform at Carrier grade to deliver 9 x 5 reliability to all their partners. In an effort to get a better feel of the UC market this year, and in the year ahead, we spoke to Paul Harrison, the Managing Director of thevoicefactory, to get his thoughts on what channel partners need to do to stay competitive in this disruptive marketplace.
How Are You Helping Partners and Customers Succeed?
thevoicefactory is particularly specialised in the way they empower their channel partners to promote sales and increase hosted telephony adoption. They focus exclusively on specific verticals like Hospitality, Automotive, Legal, and Travel/Tourism, to ensure they have the best reach when it comes to proven deployment opportunities. Paul told me:
"We try to offer the most advanced UC solutions on an international basis, to help our partners target bigger organisations that are ready to take on the benefits of hosted telephony. We now have the same solution available in the UK, in the USA, and there are about 2 hotels a day going live with the TVF solution. For us, this simply highlights that we're targeting the right verticals, the right partners, and effectively separating ourselves from the competition."
As a relatively disruptive company in the UC space, I was keen to find out what Paul thought made thevoicefactory so appealing as a partner solution: "I've been selling telephony platforms for years, so I had a good insight into what service providers were missing when I got started with TVF. There are a lot of providers out there who believe it's all about a price-focused race to the bottom. However, when you're focused completely on price, people stop associating you with quality."TVF want to help their partners avoid the race to the bottom by targeting larger enterprises and verticals.
"We believe that hosted telephony is for anyone, it's just about how you sell it."
What Have You Learned From 2017?
2017 has been a year of digital transformation (DX) and evolution for a lot of companies in the Unified Communications space. I was interested to find out what Paul thought TVF had learned from the complex marketplace over the last year.
"I think what a lot of people don't realise is that 100 seats are much stickier than 10 seats. The bigger the company, the longer they stay with their hosted solutions. We've focused on enterprises and verticals, so we can separate ourselves from our competitors, and ensure that we're taking advantage of the stickier nature of bigger companies. The result is that we're not getting as much churn as some of the other businesses in the marketplace that focus on smaller companies."
One of the most important disruptive factors in the UC world this year, has been the growth of consolidation between some of the biggest brands in the field. With Mitel purchasing ShoreTel, and Cisco buying BroadSoft, I asked Paul what he thought about these changes, and what they meant to TVF.
"I think the amount of consolidation going on is interesting. There are a lot of new entrants to the market, and I think that many traditional PBX suppliers are desperately looking for ways to evolve into software companies."
