The most recent Lync Council was held at the Michelin star French restaurant, La Chapelle where Senior Executives from traditional telecoms partners and Microsoft partners discussed the following key subjects: the engagement process with Microsoft, leveraging the opportunity and exploring how to make margin. In addition the deployment challenges of Lync in a Microsoft Office 365 environment were also rationalised.
Ralph Donohue (pictured), General Manager for the UK, Ireland & Greece, commented “The Lync Council is the perfect forum for Westcon to garner feedback from partners on Lync - on what’s hot and what’s not. The objective is to collectively share experiences, successes and challenges and to look at how to resolve issues, how to realise revenue opportunities and fundamentally how to increase margin.”
Increasing Revenue
Partners expressed concern on how they can make money from Lync; the opportunity is in the professional services and installation, and to use Lync as a driver to make high margins on the eco-system products that creates the infrastructure for a Lync environment. Westcon’s eco-system provides partners with: flexibility, choice and best of breed solutions from a single source.
Integration with Microsoft 365
Partners revealed that the integration of Lync Enterprise Voice into Microsoft Office 365 was a real opportunity and if vendors could accelerate this it would be of significant interest. Westcon’s partnership with Active Communications delivers the ACS product set which simplifies and accelerates the deployment of Microsoft Lync Enterprise Voice for environments that also include Office 365.
Facilitating Microsoft’s Engagement Process
Westcon acts as a facilitator helping partners to engage with vendors and fast track their Lync strategy.
“The on-boarding process with Microsoft is complicated and very different in comparison to dealing with traditional communications vendors. The Westcon team excelled themselves by facilitating our engagement with Microsoft enabling us to accelerate Lync into our portfolio,” commented Richard Pendleton, 4net Technologies.