Corelea Group conducted a survey of 300 US and Canadian channel partners about cloud, but specifically UCaaS and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service).
The striking statistics for me are as follows:
- Many Agents still find Cloud business not cost-effective for themselves (40%).
- 80 percent of the respondents are selling UCaaS or CCaaS already.
- 60% said they were selling SD-WAN. It makes me wonder if they meant sold or offering.
No surprise that none are prepared to stop selling network and go 100% cloud.
Partners’ have a confidence issue in cloud providers delivering a good customer experience. That reiterates my claim that Service Delivery or Customer Experience has to become Job 1 for the service provider that wants to rise to the top.
Partners cannot clearly differentiate the cloud services. In other words, the service providers have done a poor job of messaging. Can you name the target buyer of any cloud service?
I understand why the message has been 1 to 1000 all these years: the Hosted VoIP space has not taken off like many predicted and revenue – any revenue – is acceptable to the providers even if they have to forego revenue or profits.
However, the pricing pressure that UC providers are feeling correlates to their inability to position themselves in the marketplace.
In the pharmaceutical world, once a drug comes off patent and the generic hits the market, everything changes for the brand manufacturer. The advertising tone changes, prices drop, coupons start, and other ways to hold market share while overall revenue from the off-patent drug plummets. It must feel like Broadsoft has come off patent for many UC providers. Only none of that have prepared the marketing for it. They all still act like they are patent protected and no one else has the active ingredient. They couldn’t be more wrong, since even the channel partners can’t differentiate!
That same pricing pressure means that many won’t/can’t change. They won’t invest in the product, in marketing, in training or in research. They will continue to do what they have done – the definition of insanity.
As an agent, I hear from VoIP/UC players all the time. (Quite a few are clients.) While I hear the SD-WAN hype loud and clear, cloud backup and security providers have not done a great job of getting the message out. Security messaging is usually tied to a product (secure Internet or secure SIP) unless it is a LEC pushing their latest product. “We got some DDoS here! Who wants some DDoS!” With about that much sophistication.
The partners in the study even remark that there is a lack of reliable SIP Providers. Technical challenges (like Fax over IP) and lack of end-user education are also factors as to why partners aren’t jumping into the VoIP game.
If we take UCaaS as being the largest cloud service actively being offered by channel partners, then the other providers can learn from this segment.
On the service delivery, providers must consider that post-ink there is a lot of work to be done (data to be gathered) in order for the customer to have a positive experience. User mapping is probably the largest puzzle piece, but hunt groups, ACD and IVR scripts are also important for UCaaS/CCaaS deployment. Number porting and toll-free are just one more moving part that must be included in the deployment checklist with the customer.
To be done properly, service delivery needs to be a PMO. “A PMO is a Project Management Office. It’s a function within an organization that defines the standards for project management. The main purpose of a PMO is to make sure that projects and programs are run in a repeatable, standardized way,” according to Ten Six Consulting and Wikipedia. Checklists and repeatable processes can go far to improve service delivery.
There are things that will improve reliability and call quality of SIP trunking and UC. One is the fact that ISPs are providing fatter Internet pipes to businesses. Many cablecos are rolling out DOCSIS 3 or higher. Meanwhile 4G has improved as well. These two pipes are utilized in several SD-WAN deployments in order to increase uptime, speed, reliability and packet delivery. This will make its way into a better service delivery (without a managed solution with MPLS or a dedicated drop just for voice).
Other parts of the survey, beg the question: what is the master agency doing to solve either the Service Delivery issue or the vendor positioning problem?
I have had discussions with master agencies about why they have so many vendors. There are numerous answers from agents ask for them to we needed to fill out our portfolio. Unfortunately, that means that there won’t be anyone who can explain the difference between the vendors. Therein lays one of the issues the channel is facing.
If you walked into a pharmacy aisle for over-the-counter cold medicine and the pharmacist couldn’t help you decide which one to buy, would you go back to that pharmacy?
There are already a few master agencies that have specialized. An example is COLOTRAQ in the data center space. Yes, they have 400+ vendors globally but they have subject matter experts to help agents choose a vendor. And they have placed that knowledge at your fingertips with DCITRAQ.
Another example is LANtelligence, who specializes in the design, deployment and support of UC and CCaaS. LANtelligence offers an expertise that covers solution design, implementation services and post-project support, as well as vendor selection and sales support. They don’t have a hundred vendors, just some of the best in the space like Mitel, Genesys, Lifesize and 8×8. Our industry is in need of Subject Matter Experts like LANtelligence. It seems to be what the channel is asking for.
The channel is in the middle of a transition. However, it is challenging to transition a business (like a MSP or an Agency) when the current revenue is in jeopardy. Also, change is uncomfortable; moreso when you don’t have confidence in the new line-up of vendors. Microsoft may have made mistakes, but it was fixable – and they weren’t going out of business and no one was getting fired for choosing Microsoft. That can’t be said for cloud communications or other cloud services just yet.
Until the cloud vendors become as stable as Cisco or Microsoft, the channel may need to lean on specialized agencies like LANtelligence and COLOTRAQ in order to better serve their customers.