Since the company’s founding in 2006, Nectar has been providing Managed Service Providers with advanced Service Management tools, helping them gain insight into their customers’ collaboration, voice and contact center environments. As customers move to cloud-based UCaaS and CCaaS technologies, new challenges arise. Nectar has evolved its solutions and strategies to better service both MSPs and their customers on their cloud journeys.
I sat down with Bob Lynch, Chief Revenue Officer at Nectar, to discuss the new challenges and what Nectar is doing to help its MSPs address them successfully.
From On-Prem to Cloud-Based
“When we think of a business’s communications infrastructure, there are three main areas of focus that need to be managed: the platform, the network infrastructure, and the end points. In legacy UC and collaboration infrastructures, all of that was on-prem,” Lynch explains.
“Our MSPs would design, install and manage their customers’ infrastructure, troubleshoot it, expand it, make sure it’s up to date and provide security around it”
But what happens when some of that infrastructure becomes cloud-based?
Having the platform component in the cloud has become the new norm, and many customers migrate to the cloud aiming for less complexity. But according to Lynch, the move to cloud doesn’t lessen the challenge around managing the entire infrastructure, especially when it comes to troubleshooting issues.
“There are still pieces on-prem – or in other remote locations like employees’ and agents’ homes – that require visibility and management, even if the platform has moved into the cloud. You still have physical and virtual endpoints including home-based phones, laptops and PCs; as well as network infrastructure. All those things need to be managed and monitored,” Lynch says.
“As our MSPs’ customers switch to cloud-based solutions, we continue to provide the visibility, troubleshooting capability and tooling needed for managed services so that our partners can continue to provide value to their customers.”
From Single-Vendor to Multi-Vendor
Another side-effect of the transition to the cloud is customers moving from single-vendor UC and CC infrastructures to relying on multiple vendors across all three domains (platform, network, endpoint), which creates a new set of challenges.
“Typically, in the legacy, on-premises world, customers had a single UC or contact center platform vendor – Avaya, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. Today, we see many customers with a hybrid, multi-vendor infrastructure. A customer can have Avaya-based infrastructure, but use Zoom for meetings and collaboration, for example,” Lynch explains.
Fortunately for its MSP partners, Nectar is perfectly equipped to cater to the needs arising from those multi-platform environments.
“We have a unique value proposition in that we embrace many vendors’ technologies with our Nectar DXP solution. This solution provides a unified, simple view of a customer’s infrastructure, as well as real-time status information for users, platforms, network, endpoints and SBCs. This is what allows us to remain relevant to our MSPs and continue to help them provide value to their customers in a multi-vendor, hybrid environment.”
A Change of Strategy
Another key thing that allows Nectar to maintain relevance through the cloud transition is its flexibility in adopting new strategies according to market shifts. One of the most important shifts in the past two years has been the transition to Hybrid Work.
“That presents its own set of challenges with regards to both visibility and troubleshooting end-user experience issues. We were well-positioned to pivot quickly so that we could meet the needs of our partners and customers to support work-from-home,” Lynch shares.
“We’ve continued to innovate and embrace all those different environments: on-prem, cloud, endpoints and WFH”
Nectar also provides what they call their API set, allowing MSPs to white label Nectar’s solutions and integrate the data with their own technology.
“In that case, we’re even more of a back-end provider to MSPs, and it’s becoming increasingly popular. In fact, this seems to be the next evolution of our business model,” Lynch shares.
“While we’ve supported and worked with major MSPs for years, our ability to integrate our technology into our partners’ own service management solutions in a seamless way has never been better.”
