Collaboration MARKET REPORT
“With recent licencing changes it is much cheaper and easier to turn Teams into a phone system and this is
where resellers come in – adding dial-tone to Teams by selling Direct Routing.” Andrew Dickinson, MD of Jola
sell wrap-around and managed
services. A lot of resellers
don’t just sell telephony and
would be selling IT services
into customers. Also, most
of the larger vendor sell via
the channel from a license
perspective, so the channel can
still be involved in the sale.”
Mark Smith, Chief
Marketing Ocer of Atos
UCC, commented “In terms
of collaboration products
themselves, there are few
dierentiators - basic feature
sets are relatively on par and
pricing can often be similar.
Where we can identify
dierentiators, these are mostly
surrounding the openness of
platforms. ose with the most
friendly API environments,
or that can extend support
for alternative use cases, are
easily dierentiated from those
locked to desktop, mobile
devices or specic ecosystems.”
Iain Sinnott, Sales &
Marketing Director of
VanillaIP said “Collaboration
is one of those words that
means dierent things to
dierent people. It starts
from a ‘meeting’, which in
post March 23rd 2020 means
a virtual meeting, and is
essentially a bringing together
of minds in a huddle.
For some organisations this
expands up to formal project
and task management with
visible tracking, integrated
messaging and document
management and progress
reporting.
Dierent products suit
the dierent depths of
interest organisations have
in the collaborative process
so resellers may need to
carry multiple options. e
dierentiator might fall into
this concept of depth of use
across meetings, document
share and remote control,
recording and storage of
recordings, transcription
of recordings and key word
search or project and task
management with stage
reporting.”
The elephant in the room -
Teams
Microsoft Teams is the talk
of the town right now and as
Top Collaboration Vendors
• Microsoft - bundling Teams into the Microsoft 365 landscape
has led to the rapid adoption of Teams for many large knowledge
organizations who are heaviest users of the M365 productivity
suite.
• Google - Google has heavily simplified its collaboration landscape
in recent years coalescing around Hangouts and Meet, all of
course integrated into the G-Suite productivity suite.
• RingCentral - Rapid expansion through partnerships with the
likes of BT, Telus, Avaya and Atos Unify gives them capability
beyond other vendors who are locked into desktops, mobiles and
productivity suites. A strong Channel model also grants access
for the trusted advisors & communities many businesses still
rely upon.
• Slack - Community is key to Slack and nobody is doing a better
job of managing and building advocates in the market today.
Growth is fuelled by passionate users who love the way they
work and connectivity with business tools.
• Zoom - Last on the list, but first in terms of growth in this period.
Zoom could be considered just a video tool, but it’s more a Video
forward collaboration tool. Messaging, voice and the other
feature set is simply secondary. Connectivity into the wider
business tooling will be a hurdle they will need to jump to retain
the benefit of their rapid growth.
businesses look to consolidate
the various tools in their
estate it is likely that Teams
will be high on the list for
consideration. Microsoft
touches virtually every business
in one form or another and
given the integration into the
Microsoft application estate,
and now an increasingly
competitive Direct Routing
landscape, the meteoric rise of
users was always coming with,
or without, the pandemic.
Andrew Dickinson, MD
of Jola, commented, “Micro-
SMEs are using Zoom and
Teams, SMEs and Enterprise
are mainly using Teams,
with Google Meet and Slack
growing due to Lockdown,
but are considered also-rans
in the business scheme-ofthings.
Microsoft Teams has
in hosted seats but one of our
fastest growing products is
Direct Routing. e challenge
here for resellers that didn’t sell
their customers their Oce
licenses is provisioning. Jola
has solved this problem by
automating the provisioning
process, however resellers will
still need to get their customers
to enter their MS credentials
themselves, or give them admin
rights to do so.
e channel has never relied
on the measly commissions
for selling MS Oce. Instead
they have made their margin
from support – charging per
seat, per month. As a chunk of
the market port their numbers
into Teams, this opportunity
will grow. Traditional IT
support companies have mainly
avoided ‘mucky minutes’ due
to billing/numbering/porting
capabilities and here there is an
opportunity for collaboration
and consolidation. e SME
market is ‘owned’ by the
channel and I am optimistic
that this will continue.”
Julien Bertheuil, Managing
Director EMEA, Spectralink
says “With workers becoming
more and more mobile, it’s
increasingly important for
the advantage that it has built
conferencing and calling into
the existing Oce stack, so it
does everything. With recent
licencing changes it is much
cheaper and easier to turn
Teams into a phone system
and this is where resellers come
in – adding dial-tone to Teams
by selling Direct Routing.
As businesses return to their
oces we are seeing a spike >
Andrew Dickinson, MD of Jola
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