Comms Business talks to Richard Stevenson, CEO at Red Box about key growth areas, market trends and channel strategies. It’s all about hybrid deployments, AI and the growing recognition of the significance and importance of voice.
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What have been your key growth areas during the past year and what are your growth expectations for the coming 12 months?
Richard Stevenson (RS): We have seen two key growth areas in the last 12 months: compliance-led growth (around MiFID II & GDPR in particular) and continued growth of our global reseller partner base.
Over the next 12 months we expect growth to be driven by a more expansive use of voice data by customers and we will be working with our resellers to create additional revenue opportunities through our partner ecosystem which will enable customers to maximise the value of captured voice data.
CBM: What are the three main market trends and emerging markets that are influencing your go-to-market strategy this year? Please include impact of GDPR if applicable
RS: The main market trends influencing our go-to-market strategy this year are firstly the growing recognition of the significance and importance of voice and the tools available to customer to unlock this highly valuable data set that was previously only accessible by listening.
Recent advances in AI and Machine Learning mean that voice based interaction has progressed beyond compliance and is being used to address automation, security, fraud, enhance employee engagement and the customer experience, as well as fuelling AI strategies.
Secondly, Data sovereignty - organisations are now taking an enterprise wide view of voice capture to understand conversations taking place across their entire business. They are placing increased importance on retaining the ability to securely access that data wherever it resides (in line with regulations).
Thirdly there is a move to true hybrid models where we’re seeing a continued desire from customers to access Cloud services whilst maximising on premise investments.
CBM: How do these market drivers translate into your near/mid-term channel strategy?
RS: Providing a resilient, open and connected platform that operates and scales on all cloud and on-premise environments whilst ensuring the capture of all voice communications from new world and old world telephony, will remain core to our strategy moving forward.
We will also be working with our resellers to ensure they are as relevant as they can be to their customers beyond infrastructure. This means ensuring there is close alignment to customers’ true business drivers and agendas and connecting our resellers to a partner ecosystem that creates additional value and the desired business outcomes for customers around the voice data set.
CBM: What strategic channel moves will you be making in the coming year in terms of attacking existing markets with new products/services and addressing new markets with new products/services?
RS: We’ll be linking our open platform philosophy to the continued development of a value added ecosystem of partners. Our resellers can leverage this ecosystem to create additional revenue opportunities by helping organisations maximise the value of their voice data by using it seamlessly in multiple tools and applications, whether for compliance, reconstructing trades or predictive analytics where machine learning can be applied to influence business strategy, increase efficiencies and reduce operational costs.
We’re also providing resellers with an additional revenue opportunity through a platform-enabled managed service offering.
CBM: What do you see as the biggest challenges/opportunities in the UK ICT channel and how will you maximise the opportunity and address the challenges as they relate to you?
RS: The landscape is changing and there is a real opportunity around the realisation that voice holds more inherent value that any other data set.
The challenge is helping resellers to be best positioned to add value for customers by helping them to support customers in bridging the gap between new world and old world technologies, improving efficiencies and delivering future predictive outcomes. Understanding the AI tools customers want to leverage, the data required to feed them and the platform to connect them together will unlock additional revenue streams.