The "Cloud" transition of Voice and PBX has been well underway for many years now. Infonetics cites 13% growth in 2013 for hosted PBX with steady growth into 2018. While on-premises sales are decreasing, many channel companies are challenged with adapting their business model and service offerings to meet the changing end customer preferences for cloud based communication solutions.
In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts were posed the following questions: how can/should unified communications VARs/resellers di
The UC market has been growing over the past few years, however, the growth has been slower than expected, in large part because of the difficulty in proving the Return on Investment (ROI) of UC to potential customers, as well as the benefits and impact UC will have on their businesses. A 2103 channel survey conducted by UCStrategies showed that a UC proposal is rejected 53 percent of the time either due to lack of ROI or budget.
I spend far too much time with data on solution providers, i.e. VARs, MSPs, Service Providers, etc., so I decided to put together the numbers for the channel companies we have identified in North American that sell and service UC solutions - about 3,000 company headquarters. I included the vendors from the recent Gartner UC Enterprise Study excluding Huawei and Toshiba because I didn't feel our data was a good representation of their channel.
It's clear to most industry observers that one of the biggest challenges facing unified communications and collaboration vendors is how to best help their channel partners grow and succeed. Until vendors are able to understand and fully partner with the channel, the market will experience only sluggish growth.
Tigerpaw Software Inc., announced its new Ambassador program. It is a collection of product evangelists. If you are not familiar with Tigerpaw, the company makes CRM software optimized for VARs. The company officially targets IT, telephony, security, Audio/video, and POS dealer organizations. The company claims to have 35,000 customers.
I keep hearing from vendors their intent to recruit more dealers. It's pretty easy to understand. Most manufacturers want to increase sales. More dealers times the average revenue per dealer equates to more sales, right? Perfectly sound logic for those with their head buried.
Vendors need to stop growing their channels, and start growing their dealers. The trick is in increasing the average revenue per dealer, not the number of dealers.