The stunning Loews Sapphire Falls Resort at Universal Orlando was the location for 2019’s iteration of SkySwitch’s annual user group conference, Vectors. The event gathers SkySwitch’s reseller and service provider partners together for a packed four days filled with learning opportunities, platform and product updates and face to face networking that – in and increasingly disconnected world – proves invaluable.
UC Today were on hand to cover all of the news for you and bring you interviews with some of the headlines speakers. Founder and President of SkySwitch, Eric Hernaez, joined us for a video interview to give us a breakdown on all of the main news headlines from the show.
Watch the video interview here.
SD-WAN a Major Focus
SkySwitch is keen to equip its partners with cutting edge technology solutions that are going to augment their existing portfolios and no solution has proved of more interest to resellers and service providers in recent years than SD-WAN. Taking the power of software-defined networking (SDN) technology and utilising that for traditional hardware based networks offers partners a host of potential benefits. Creating more flexible networks and simplifying management processes are just two of the benefits alongside the well-publicised security amplifications.
Offering its partners an opportunity to leverage these benefits, SkySwitch announced during Vectors that it has formed a strategic relationship with Adaptiv Networks. Adaptiv Networks specialise in software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) for business-critical application traffic requiring high availability, just the demands of SkySwitch’s partner network.
The partnership appears logical from a number of perspectives. Both Adaptiv and SkySwitch operate through a strict channel only go-to-market model ensuring the sovereignty of partners as a primary ethos. As well as the synergies with the market approach both SkySwitch’s partners and Adaptiv are focused on helping small to medium businesses. Bernard Breton, CEO of Adaptiv Networks, told UC Today why this was so important.
“From a value proposition perspective – SD-WAN is really enabling those small and medium customers to gain access to high performance networking activity to support their digital services such as UC. So this new partnership is a marriage made in heaven for them.”
The new partnership will allow SkySwitch partners to ally their industry leading UCaaS platforms with the network visibility, security and control provided by an SD-WAN solution. Offering end customers the ability to access – previously unobtainable – sophisticated networking capabilities is another strong tool to compete in such completive markets.
Now is the Best Time to Be Selling UCaaS – Jeff Pulver
As well as packing Vectors 2019 with news, SkySwitch, also provided its partners with selection of industry leading speakers to evoke new ideas and approaches that could be applied within their own businesses. One of those keynote speakers was Jeff Pulver. A successful entrepreneur – who has been involved in over 400 startup businesses – Pulver is best known for co-founding several huge communication businesses including Vonage.
Pulver spoke to the Vetcor’s attendees about the opportunity they have right now in the communications market. Pulver believes that UCaaS is entering a golden window where partners have all of the features, functions and capabilities to provide truly transformative services and solutions to their end customers.
UC Today caught up with Pulver to get his thoughts on the market in general, take a look back at where the whole UC industry started and find out why now is the best time to be selling UCaaS.
Watch the video interview here.
SkySwitch Helps with Critical E911 Emergency Issues
911 appears to be a simple enough emergency number to dial in any of the nearly 250 million instances it is required in the US. But too often systems require prefixes and sometimes this confusion ends in tragedy. The introduction of Kari’s Law was designed to prevent such tragedies.
The new law, which comes in to full effect next year, which needs to be addressed by anyone installing, managing or operating multi-line telephone systems is of particular relevance to SkySwitch partners. At Vectors 2019, SkySwitch, wanted to place particular focus on the issue, not only to ensure partner compliance but also to try and come together to remedy other issues with emergency dialling such as location identification of VoIP services.
UC Today recorded a podcast, during Vectors, discussing E911 related issues and Kari’s Law with SkySwitch’s Vice President Of Business Development, Harlan Hamlin, Joe Barasoain, Director of Emergency Services in Fulton County, Georgia, and Captain Scott L. Brillman, Director of 911 Services for the City of Baltimore, Maryland.
IDC’s Amy Lind Reviews the 2020 UCaaS Market for Resellers
Providing a truly independent perspective within annual partner events can be a tricky task. SkySwitch managed this with its selection of external speakers and none more so than IDC’s Amy Lind. As one of the world’s leading research and market intelligence firms IDC has garnered the respect of the unified communications industry and its insights provide unbiased advice for resellers and sevrice providers.
With decades of industry experience, Amy Lind – who is Research Manager for Broadband, Enterprise Voice & IP Communications Services, and Unified Communications at IDC – took to the stage for the final keynote. Lind took the delegates through some of IDC’s latest research relating to the SMB UCaaS market. Part of Lind’s synopsis was the huge opportunity available to the channel if they choose to target small to medium business rather than focus on large enterprises. Lind also revealed other interesting findings that were of particular interest to the SkySwitch partner community. You can hear about all of the research and Lind’s main conclusions in a video interview that she conducted at the show with UC Today.
Vectors 2019 covered such a focused set of topics and themes that partners in a attendance where left with no shortage of detail in any area. Market analysis, sales tactics and regulations were all given their individual focus in between news updates on the latest SkySwitch platform enhancements and feature additions. Any potential partners in attendance will certainly be considering becoming a SkySwitch partner as it appears you cannot afford to miss out on the event next year.
To find out more about Vectors 2019, you can visit SkySwitch’s official conference website, and follow Vectors 2019 and UC Today on social media to keep up with all the news from the event.
