Dial Tone - My first week enabling partners to broaden their service portfolio

Well I've completed my first week in the hybrid work segment. It's been a steep learning curve. The last time I worked in a very focused way on this technology was circa 2006 as the IP PBX emerged. My company?helped introduce and sell on-premise VoIP solutions connecting to ISDN (and in a couple of cases POTS) telco lines. Since then I've been working in IT Infrastructure and Security segments, helping owners enter, automate and scale their businesses by leveraging partnerships and vendor resources. Over the last?several days I've been exploring the Collaboration landscape with a particular emphasis on the integration of voice and data, and how these once disparate worlds connect in todays business environment to deliver a much richer experience for customers, employees, and multi-party project groups looking to communicate in our enhanced world of multi-location hybrid working.

?

It's exciting to see how technology in the telephony segment has not only kept pace, but transformed as related disciplines like Cloud, and Process Automation have grown, and industry giants like Cisco and Microsoft have invested in what the evolving future could look like. So what have I learned?

?

Customers have adopted, and technology business practices have matured, with many partner principals getting their heads around the equity value in transitioning from Projects based operating methodology to a Monthly Recurring Revenue focus. I've been reminded that Dial-Tone is a 'sticky' service, with some businesses not taking action on modernising their systems or moving providers without an extremely compelling business reason. Today customers seem to be spread across a technology spectrum encompassing 4 broad generations.

• Traditional PBX?Onsite
• IP PBX Onsite
• Standalone IP PBX Hosted/Cloud
• UCaaS

?

Traditional PBX?Onsite: In the days ahead I will turn attention to the marketplace and work alongside partners at the coalface, I hope we wont discover too many customers in this category… but I suspect we are going to find a few well to the right of the Technology Adoption Curve . While companies in this category may have survived lockdown through crutching disparate technologies, customer demand; hybrid work as standard and legacy service disconnection mean that they are ripe for transformation discussions. In my previous role I spent a good deal of time understanding how NZ partners could leverage very comprehensive resources from global vendors like Microsoft to help customers see how their business could improve through adoption of new tech.

?

IP PBX Onsite: Characterised as 'black arts' by both IT and CAS companies in the early days, this disruptive technology brought new skillsets, a range of 1st generation integration apps, and the emergence of IP telephony for call centers. In this generation a lot of IT businesses adopted a marketing plan that centered on customer education about VoIP, SIP, and IP Telephony as a technical concept. I've been quite surprised to see a number of IT resellers still using this as their main marketing theme to attract unified communications business. No wonder specialist CSP providers with their emphasis on ease of use, customer outcomes, control and business assurance continue to thrive.

?

IP PBX Hosted/Cloud - An Expert business. Looking at the NZ IT landscape (and this no doubt exists all over the world) only a fraction of the IT businesses grow beyond 10 staff and scale to achieve longevity, succession and significant equity value, and in past entrepreneurial activities I have certainly lived this path myself. A core reason is businesses founded on expertise, solving problems as they are presented, and focusing on inhouse skillsets miss a leap over the chasm to Productisation, harnessing of Channels and building Brand Equity that can scale past their core team. Maintenance, upgrade, security and other hidden costs weigh you down. Through my volunteering in business networking in the second half of the 2010s I met a number of amazing business coaches with effective tools to help transform these business problems. It's an opportunity superset that dwarfs our segment of communications in the tech industry that I think will always exist.

?

UCaaS - The adoption of the mindset that partnering with experts who continually invest in service enhancements, own platform reliability, and deliver a service that IT partners can expand to thousands of endpoints with little more effort than they can deploy to 5. Following trends in CRM, Marketing, and Accounting, partnering with a specialist provider and onselling their solution as a mark-up on a license/usage fee is a more recently developed offering for tech business owners that are serious about implementing foundations for a business that becomes an asset. The really nice benefit of this approach is that is creates a very sticky MRR that significantly improves the life of company directors, freeing them to focus on delivering expanded services, going deeper with profitable customers and building a resilient company that can thrive without key personnel (including themselves).

?

?

As an IT Director, how are you thinking about the role that hybrid-work enabling technology is going to play in the next steps for your business? Are you investing capital into bespoke solutions to solve customer problems as they arise? How do you feel about the tradeoff between developing low-cost, or "free" options for customers verses the licensing costs of a partner platform that you have to then mark-up and on sell to customers? How often are you finishing your invoicing run knowing that services you have turned on for customers will deliver revenue for months and years to come?

?

One advantage of being new into a segment is the opportunity to consider the direction of a market from a somewhat independent point of view. I've seen the emergence, success and equity results that subscription oriented businesses have achieved in parallel fields like those mentioned above, and I hope in the coming weeks I can apply some of this thinking inside partner businesses that I have the opportunity to work with. Could that be you? I would love for it to be.