Most UK comms providers will note that 2016 created a lot of uncertainty in customer buying decisions due to Brexit and various other economic challenges. However, it appears that the market might have more than just currency to battle in 2017.
Historically in the UK, business communications vendors have either sold indirectly, and/or via distributors, allowing for value-added resellers (VARs) to the direct selling, ongoing support, and installing on the behalf of their clients. However, as a result of new UCaaS platforms being launched by telecoms vendors a new way of working is emerging. It's not that resellers are being cut out of the picture. Rather, it seems that the traditional telecoms model is evolving and starting to move in a different direction.
An analyst reported recently that more than half of new orders for business communications systems would be cloud hosted (UCaaS) by 2020 versus on-premise solutions. If these estimations are accurate, it means that the reseller role will change quite rapidly in the next 3 years.
Take a Look at the Evidence…
Think about it, if the vendor is responsible for the data centre build-out, setup, maintenance, upgrades and offers a simple to use web based interface - what is there left for the reseller to do? Cloud based apps across the technology sphere are becoming simpler to use, almost self-deployed to a degree. What's more, in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) world, the same trend is emerging.
Consider BroadSoft, for instance. They’re the largest UCaaS player in the world and the reseller engineering course lasts just one day! RingCentral and 8x8, our North American friends, are now competing in the U.K market and their model is ultra-simple, feature packed and low cost, too. Their workforces are relatively small in comparison to traditional vendors such as Avaya and Mitel.
Many more service providers are now jumping into the unified comms arena and as far as we can tell the technology is very quickly being de-skilled. What are our tech teams going to look like in the future? Will they be techs or customer service agents?
Interestingly if you take cloud's simplicity and modern digital marketing and communication methods you get pretty much a self-help platform like Salesforce.com or WordPress. In other words, massively successful SaaS & PaaS software vendors, where partners work with end users to help maximise results. The partners make little or no money from the vendor's product sales, however thrive on delivering that 'value-added' service that the vendor cannot offer, does not want to offer or struggles to provide to their clients.
