I caught up with Mattias Ohde, CEO, Soluno BC (pictured, above), for an exclusive UC Today interview. Ohde shed some light into the company’s partner landscape and told me about many of the resources available for Soluno partners so they can be what Ohde called “Happy and empowered partners.”
For the past year, I’ve covered Soluno, and the company’s made some serious headway, along the way, announcing various strategic partnerships with the likes of T-Mobile Netherlands to bring to fruition a robust mobile-first offering, to address the B2B market.
“If we compare ourselves to other software companies, the big difference between us is the number of resources we extend to new and existing customers”
He added, Soluno goes ‘above and beyond,’ not just providing a CD that walks partners through building a solution, a data center, infrastructure, firewalls, self-service tools, etc. Ohde continued, telling me, Soluno handles maintenance, upgrades, and more, leaving service providers and mobile operator partners to focus on deploying customized solutions. All this is available for white labeling or under the Soluno BC brand, I learned.
Soluno has a defined integration strategy, already pairing with dozens of unified communications, collaboration tools including Microsoft Teams, Slack, CRM systems like Salesforce, and countless contact center solutions, which is why Ohde sees his company as more of a CPaaS provider as he put it.
“By taking our smorgasbord of solutions, packaging them and presenting them to our partners, we find this provides a lot of value for them so they can tailor their solutions”
As a managed service provider and CPaaS enabler, Ohde said the company wants to make the deployment and management experience simpler for its partner landscape. And since all partners are unique, Soluno must remain agile. For example, one partner might want to take an entire white-labeled concept and run with it, selling the offering under its branding “This still has a lot of value.”
On the other hand, Ohde said there are those partners who want to mix and match offerings to create a solution specific to the needs of the organization that will deploy it. The range of what partners seek is wide, which he attributes to being one of Soluno’s strengths.
In the business environment, such agility is key – meeting companies where they are instead of expecting them to come where you are. “We already have 15 years of experience of delivering service under our brand in Sweden so we take that and replicate the experience throughout Europe. The company does have some considerations, however, the nuances of the European continent along with its communications preferences.
“We even consult with our partners in each country, including new markets we want to enter to find out how we can work together to be as successful as possible.” To date, Soluno has close to 200,000 seats in the cloud and said it’s more than tripled its customer base over the past three years. When it comes to partners, the Swedish company has active partners in each of the Nordic states, as well as the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK.
