The Research Behind Ribbon’s Mida Partnership

Ribbon Communications and Mida Solutions are the perfect partnership

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Published: August 13, 2021

Maya Middlemiss

Ribbon Communications has always taken a pragmatic approach to optimising the UC tech stack, collaborating with strategic partners to ensure ‘best in breed’ provision for their customers instead of being wedded to what they can build internally.

And the partnership with Mida Solutions is a great example of how this kind of collaboration most effectively meets the needs of UC customers, particularly as they are growing and extending UC adoption within their organisation.

A recent (November 2020) survey of European and Americas IT decision-makers highlighted clear differences in need between those who had adopted UC versus those who had not (yet) and also pointed to significant shifts between this dataset vs the previous survey round in April 2019 — a lifetime ago, in collaboration technology terms. And those needs have only become more complex, making a partnership solution the most effective response.

Seeing The Light on UC

As John Macario, Senior VP Enterprise and Channel Marketing, pointed out, one big change is the number of small companies with a full-time IT person, which has increased from a third to more than half since the pandemic lockdowns. “If you’re the owner of a 50-person business, and all of a sudden, your entire company is going to be remote, and you’ve got no infrastructure, things have to change. Some hadn’t really paid much attention to it before, like the 18% who said they didn’t manage it at all. We think that these SMBs have gotten “IT religion”, and one result of that has been increased UC adoption.”

The survey also indicated a dramatic change in awareness of, as well as uptake of, Microsoft Teams — with ‘no awareness’ response level altering from 46% to 15%.

Giovanni Nieddu, Business Development Manager at Mida Solutions, noted that the need to extend Teams functionality was also clearly indicated in the data, with businesses of all kinds demanding contact centre, auto-attendant, and recording functionality — because for communications to be truly comprehensive, it has to be unified. “We are a web-based application by design, and people want that from their UC solution, as well as CRM integration,” he pointed out.

Everything Work Together, Everywhere

Flexibility and an extensive, unified feature set was the clear demand coming from the research participants, who were responding following an unprecedentedly turbulent time in communications and collaboration, and evidently planning for a more resilient and sustainable way of working together online, wherever they were.

For example, as Nieddu pointed out:

“Mida contact center, attendant console and recorder and Ribbon SBC, can all be hosted in Microsoft Azure as well as deployed on prem”

The survey data indicated that mixed solutions made economic sense for a third of respondents, demanding a flexible approach from UC suppliers. 

The close association between Ribbon and Mida was fortunately well established long before the global health crisis, and the teams were used to working together across continents long before we were all locked down. 

Like most of the trends associated with the pandemic, the uptake of Teams and other UC platforms was already on the rise, but was dramatically accelerated by unforeseen events.

Nieddu concluded:

“Our founder Attilio Licciardello had already identified the opportunity of Teams from a strategic point of view, and Ribbon had the communications bridges we needed. So, when it happened, we were ready”

 

 

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