The Coronavirus and resulting growth in collaboration solutions has opened the door for Gamma’s recent addition to its partner programme.
Gamma announced this week that it is adding an ‘Authorised Distributor’ tier to its partner programme, citing the merging of communications and IT infrastructure markets as a key factor that shaped the decision.
Speaking to UC Today, Mike Mills, Gamma’s Head of Cloud and Infrastructure, said that the growth in Teams and, consequently, Direct Routing has given Gamma an opportunity to engage with Cloud distributors that it didn’t have before.
“Teams and Direct Routing open up the IT community in a much broader way than I think it ever did previously,” said Mills. “The IT and telecoms markets had been gradually merging for five or six years, but Direct Routing and Teams have accelerated that coming together to the point where we felt that figuring out how to work with CSPs and Cloud Marketplaces was something that was important to the business.
All the hyperscalers have telco capabilities and, ultimately, Microsoft’s decision to launch a CPaaS product, and Amazon launching a contact centre are statements of intent around cloud adoption, specifically in communication.”
New Targets
Mills added that Gamma is now looking to target cloud distributors with the new tier as businesses assess their infrastructure policy after the Coronavirus lockdown.
“There is a definite acceleration for businesses adopting cloud. During COVID we saw businesses putting sticking plaster solutions over legacy infrastructure. Now, they’re having to make fairly rapid strategic decisions about which technology stack is right for them.”
“Certainly, the types of distributors we’re targeting here are cloud first, largely cloud software, cloud security-type organisations where partners can visit their marketplace and buy services digitally”
“This has represented some interesting challenges in terms of reshaping our go to market proposition and product to fit that journey, because buying telco services has always been a little bit more involved than that.
“I think if you take a slightly longer-term look at the market, the analysis and research we’ve done as a business suggests that the buying journey for communication services is going to become more digital, even to an end-user perspective. So, strategically, Gamma is looking at those digital journeys and how we make the journey, whether it be direct or via a partner, as automated as possible.”
