CBM: How is your product set helping end user businesses during this difficult time?
KJ: Reflecting on some of our work with our public sector partners, we’ve deployed thousands of seats in contact centre environments over the last three months. The NHS is committed to having their key contact centre workers available 24x7, but without relying on the use of on-premise PBXs in office environments.
We enabled 400 NHS agents to work from home in 36 hours, replicating their on-premise contact centre comms environment in the cloud. Agility and speed of deployment have been absolutely critical during this difficult time. Speed has become the new competitive battleground.
Some channel partners may perceive us as a US vendor, but we have over 350 people in our UK organisation, including 52 engineers in Europe in professional services. Our investment in local support gives us the ability to deploy critical projects, like we’ve delivered for the NHS, in timeframes measured in hours instead of days.
CBM: Does recurring revenue protect Channel businesses more than others?
KJ: Good SaaS products that enable recurring revenue should provide a solid source of organic growth for channel businesses. Of course, partners need to consider carefully what good looks like when it comes to SaaS products.
Security is the most important piece of the puzzle. Online meeting platforms have become the latest target for hackers, with the possibility of disclosing intellectual property to eavesdroppers, as well as having your meeting hijacked with undesirable content.
We have built our platform from the ground up using our own technology stack, which minimises vulnerabilities from outside integrations without sacrificing ease of use. When you focus on enabling the partner community, adoption rates go through the roof.
Our channel partners now make up 67% of all UK revenues and the number of partners has grown over 30% year-on-year. Enabling unified, remote communications is the biggest issue facing many organisations right now, so we expect to see this organic growth continue.