Elements of Successful Work from Home: Smart Office and More

At a time of unprecedented stress on all cloud services, Ribbon Communications’ first commitment to their partners and end users is to support business continuity.

As well as helping customers address any temporary surges in network traffic due to changed end-user policies, they’re offering a flexible selection of elements from their product range that partners can bundle and combine as they choose, to respond to their customers most urgent needs with the right solutions.

To understand the power and flexibility of this I spoke with John Macario, Ribbon’s Senior Vice President Global Channel Marketing. A core part of their present promotion centred on their Kandy CPaaS/UCaaS communications platform:

“Kandy is pure white-label, so our partners can brand the product any way they want”, he explained, using the example of their Canada-based partner Juxto.

“They can embed our offer within their website as a microsite, and we’ve been working with them to create branded assets and co-marketing”

And the campaign is supported with a product offer too. “Right now we’re allowing our partners to offer either a free upgrade licence to Smart Office, or a brand new Smart Office licence, free, until at least June 30th”, Macario continued. Smart Office is Ribbon Communication’s bespoke collaboration platform, including video conferencing, screensharing, whiteboarding etc — a powerful way for channel partners to create a digital workspace for their displaced customers.

Extend Microsoft Teams

Other customers might need to extend existing tool functionality, such as those in a Microsoft Teams environment. Ribbon has them covered too:

“Teams is great for internal collaboration”, Macario reflected. “But you can’t make and receive calls outside your organisation without doing Teams’ direct routing. Microsoft requires that you use a certified session border controller (SBC), and I think Ribbon has the broadest portfolio of Microsoft Certified SBCs”.

In the present promotion they are offering the SBC SWe Lite (software edition ‘lite’). “It forms a secure connection and allows any employee, wherever they are, to make or receive calls over the PSTN to partners outside the organisation — vendors, customers, whatever. We’ve got built-in configurations for all the major providers and all the major types of phone systems, they can bring this up in 10 minutes, to get an enterprise connected to the rest of the world.”

“Right now we’re offering a 50 session licence for the SWe Lite SBC, that can support up to 500 users, free of charge through to June 30th”

As well as these two powerful offers, Ribbon’s Kandy CPaaS platform also powers the AT&T API Marketplace, and they’re working with partners there to build applications to support overnight business transitions — such as click to chat tools, which can escalate contacts directly into calls or video calls, to support contact centres which have suddenly become distributed contact centres.

Ribbon’s channel partners are bundling and reselling these offers in ways which fit their own markets and verticals, to create powerful packages of support for their customers undergoing these dramatic and unexpected transitions, and enable them to get back up and running literally within hours.

In the face of incredibly challenging circumstances, the co-marketing and fulfilment provided by Ribbon completes the win-win-win circle of complete support, between the partner and their customers, enabling business continuity and resilience at the most difficult of times — as everyone digs deep and does their part, to keep the world working.