While Mitel’s channel has recently gone through some structural changes, the focuses, including an emphasis on Customer Lifecycle Management, have remained consistent, and Mitel is doubling down in those areas.
With services becoming an even more massive opportunity, HP is making a series of changes designed to make it easier for partners to work with HP around the services play, which will include simplification to significantly reduce the number of SKUs.
HP leader Enrique Lores and senior HP leaders used the HP Amplify opening keynote to lay out the company’s vision going forward and their strategy to get there.
HP executives, including Andy Rhodes, who runs Poly, discussed where Poly has come since formally joining HP, and where they are going with their integrated technologies.
Trident, a native app to consume Zoho Workplace, is just one of several new collaboration experiences from Zoho, which they expect will ultimately expand beyond the Workplace apps into other areas like marketing and sales.
Atos Unify, which is stronger in Europe while Mitel is stronger in North America, has a much stronger services business than Mitel, which should help to provide Mitel partners with upmarket services opportunities.
Kurmi’s focus is on enterprise UC provisioning and the new version of the suite extends support for Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft.
Salesforce also unveiled some major enhancements to Slack as well as Net Zero Marketplace, a platform designed to make carbon credit purchases simpler and more transparent.
The Cornwall office fits with Zoho’s overall hub and spoke strategy, and enables the high emphasis they are placing on a bilingual strategy and being able to communicate with French speaking customers in French.
Some of the new partner focused announcements , like the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction package, and the simplified compliance for working with the U.S. Department of Defense have been available to direct customers before, but have now been opened up to the channel.
Nextiva’s new app is built on their old platform, so there is continuity despite the new type of software.
Cloudli sees the acquisition as highly synergistic, from a product perspective, from a market expansion perspective, and, critically for two companies which are channel-focused, from a partner perspective.
No-code Avaya Virtual Agents make it easy for organizations to both acquire and deploy virtual agents, which improve the customer user experience, something which grades out poorly in customer surveys.
While LiveVox has been around for years, their channel is really less than a year old, and the new partner program is designed both to attract quality new partners and to get new and existing partners up to speed.
The program is scheduled to be fully rolled out by the time Nextiva has a set of major project launches late in the year, and will complement a planned international expansion, which includes Canada.
Having rebranded from LogMeIn and launched a new partner program that unites what had been three separate ones that came through acquisition, GoTo plans to rework its channel to build deeper relationships than the more transactional ones of the past.
The ControlOne platform, available in Canada as well as the U.S., is designed for MSPs, and is intended to provide both state of the art security and UCaaS in an easy to use platform.
A key benefit for traditional AV partners who have sold Zoom Rooms in the past, but been largely excluded through regulations from selling phones, is that they will be able to resell Zoom Phones with Native Capabilities. This will be phased in by geos, and while the U.S. and Canada are not in the first wave, they are on the road map.
Other priorities include more emphasis on partner business plans, and making it clear to partners how switching to the RingCentral partnership for their UCaaS puts both Mitel and their partners in a stronger position than before.
The new Clarity platform has been rebuilt from the ground up using the latest API REST architecture, and ConnectMeVoice expects that it will help attract customers beyond its traditional sub-250 customer base, as well as new partners that serve those new customers.
