Recently Ian Rowan, Senior Channel Manager at Wildix UK, took part at the panel of UC experts where he shared his opinion on how “Virus brings universal need for UCaaS”.
Barriers to UCaaS adoption have tumbled, noted Ian Rowan, Senior Channel Manager at Wildix UK.
“UCaaS opens up many new markets for partners to sell UC solutions but without all the barriers to market experienced by traditional UC solutions – high upfront costs, extended engineering skill sets, product updates and a requirement to have IT teams trained to manage complex onsite solutions,” said Rowan. “UCaaS instantly overcomes these issues and gives SMEs instant access to solutions that have only been available to enterprise level businesses. Now that these barriers have gone the SME market is purchasing UCaaS daily and soon there will be little business left for traditional telephony.”
Market drivers, Rowan also noted, that uptake of UC or UCaaS has been relatively slow in the SME segment compared to the enterprise sector. “There are many reasons for this but the drivers for change are the same,” added Rowan. “When surveyed, 80 percent of enterprises moved to UC to offer remote working whereas within SME this figure is only 40 per cent. Not because they don’t want to offer this service but the ability to measure RoI for SME is complicated compared to enterprise where tools are in place to look at changes in employee performance.”
With UCaaS there are many more performance gains and more businesses are looking at smart working to reduce overheads and increase employee satisfaction, observed Rowan, which should be a boon to the channel.
“Resellers need to focus on helping businesses realise the RoI of UCaaS and then prices become totally irrelevant,” he commented. “With the COVID-19 crisis, it is even more important that partners make the right selection of UCaaS providers and this is where a solution based on WebRTC has key advantages right now. With workforces being told not to travel and work from home then having the ability to deploy a zero-touch solution without the need for any hardware is a must.”
Read the full market review at the April issue of Comms Dealer