How do you help small and medium-sized businesses move their communications to the cloud?
And how do you make the journey as cost-effective for them and – importantly – you?
These are two burning questions for managed service providers, value added resellers and system integrators who see the huge SMB opportunity but struggle with the-often labour-intensive process and its challenging commercial return.
It’s not that the sector is indifferent to the transformative potential of modernisation.
The big enablers of enterprise over the last several years, such as Microsoft, are now eyeing the SMB market; building heavily-marketed entry-level solutions that encourage ambitious organisations to take their first steps.
Millions of those SMBs – so often the lifeblood of economies the world over – hear those messages, understand the benefits, and know they must act.
However, many lack the in-house IT resources and so look to outsource.
For MSPs keen to capitalise, the trick to making those multiple, smaller-scale deployments work is surely to leverage the efficiencies of automation and customer self-service.
And that means picking a provider partner with the right tools and the right expertise.
“SMBs typically contribute 50% to a country’s GDP so the global cloud-based voice and collaboration market is significant – the question is how do MSPs get into it profitably,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS, which has many of the answers.
“Historically, it’s been about providing and managing fairly bespoke PBX-type ’key’ telephony systems with, say, 20 telephones and multiple, manual processes and touch-points. It’s been difficult for large providers to service that segment profitably.
“Today, those SMBs want and need more enterprise-style cloud-based collaboration and communication functionality such as VoIP, chat, virtual meetings and document sharing; all easily-consumed and paid for monthly.”
For many, it’s a Microsoft Teams play.
They perhaps turned to the platform during the pandemic in order to work remotely during lockdowns and now want to leverage its voice and other capabilities that drive productivity and efficiency.
Indeed, as if to emphasis the point, Microsoft – with whom VOSS has recently announced a partnership to empower MSPs to accelerate their customers’ transition to cloud-based phone and collaboration solutions – is offering a new flexible and affordable ‘Teams Essentials’ licence geared towards the small and medium-sized sector.
Complement that offering with slick onboarding, automation, integration and self-service, and the value proposition for MSPs is transformed.
“All of that automated tooling is essential because, deploying in an SMB environment, providers face a sequence of four or five steps, typically touching multiple different people in an organisation,” says Jalland.
“They will have to acquire and provision telephone numbers; configure them with Microsoft Teams; configure SBCs; and onboard and assign telephone numbers to people. It tends to be a multi-step, manual-touch process.
“Automation streamlines all of that. It enables the end user customer to manage their own moves, adds and changes on a daily basis. It makes things simple for them and reduces workload and cost for the MSP.
“When a provider is onboarding four or five new customers a day, the economies of scale can be significant. Suddenly, the SMB sector – with its growing demand for cloud-based transformation and its need for support in achieving it – represents a profitable proposition.”
It is a context in which it is worth repeating that eye-catching, aforementioned statistic that SMBs account for 50% of the world’s GDP.
Big sector. Big number. Big opportunity.
To learn more about how VOSS can help your and your customers’ businesses grow and succeed, click here: https://go.voss-solutions.com/pivot
