No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Hosted Voice/UC in the Enterprise (Part 2): What about the Channel?

In my other life (the one responsible for my mortgage) I'm often in discussions about the channel, a group of very small to very large agents, VARs, system integrators and consulting companies that has forever been a deep and integral part of the telecom industry's fabric. Deregulation in the '70s and '80s created a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to insert and monetize a value layer between customer and vendor--and a powerful community was born.Some thirty years later, notwithstanding all that has changed in our industry, one principle remains a constant: innovation, new product and for that matter even stock price can only advance so far without the channel on-board. The vendor controls the technology, but the channel controls the customer. The buyer looks to the vendor to develop new product, but to the channel implement and more importantly fix it when it goes wrong.

And so while we speak of various drivers slowing take rate for hosted voice services in the enterprise, let us not forget the channel. Yes, hosted voice can be misconstrued as an SMB-only offering; yes, the enterprise buyer employed to manage on-prem solutions may feel threatened; and yes, selling hosted services into the enterprise is complex. But all of this can change, once the channel takes hold.

So what's keeping the channel from the cloud? Many things, but at its simplest form, it's education, motivated sales people and of course--customer demand:

* Cloud Comprehension: For too long, in the traditional "PBX" channel, the cloud has been thought of as exclusively hosted PBXs. Meaning it has been construed as the same basic offering, but delivered remotely instead of on prem. So far, 2010 is teaching us that the cloud is far more diverse than this, and offers the channel an opportunity to deliver very business process- or market segment-specific applications, without cannibalizing their legacy business. And generate margin-rich professional service revenue while they're at it.

* Sales Comp: Never underestimate this one. Channels in telecom, and the sales people that drive their growth, have worked under the ship-drop-install and get paid model for 30 years. Recurring revenue sounds nice; switching to it cannot be done overnight.

* Enterprise Demand: At the risk of generalizing, the channel is much better at responding to demand than creating it. This is not a criticism, but rather the reality of the resale business model. Very little room for the evangelistic marketing dollars required to make new markets.

I'm glad to see events like VoiceCon, UC Summit and others starting to incorporate the cloud in their content, as these are sources of education for the channel. Cloud communication, like the many innovations before, will be a better place with the channel onboard.