Maverick AV Solutions, an arm of Tech Data that focus on audio-visual (AV) technologies, this week announced it has added Zoom Video Communications to the portfolio of collaboration products and cloud services it makes available to channel partners.
Zoom Video Technologies has been making a concerted effort to increase its presence in the channel. The addition of the Zoom portfolio of collaboration and video conferencing services enables Maverik AV Solutions to expand the number of channel ecosystems it is creating around this class of technologies, says Jon Sidwick, vice president of Maverick AV Solutions.
Maverik AV Solutions already has an existing relationship with Microsoft, HP. Inc., Lenovo and Dell Technologies, each of which has its own ecosystem when it comes to collaboration technologies, says Sidwick.
In general, Sidwick says Maverik AV Solutions is seeing a massive wave of convergence occurring across AV and IT channels that have been historically separate. In some cases, AV partners are moving to acquire solution providers that have IT expertise or vice versa. Most of that merger and acquisition activity starts with partnerships where solution providers that have AV or IT expertise seek to leverage their respective expertise, says Sidwick.
“There’s a great deal of consolidation,” says Sidwick. “Things are changing rapidly.”
It’s too early to say to what degree the AV and IT channel communities will ultimately converge. But as a category with the cloud, it’s clear that all forms of unified communications are red hot. Zoom is betting that when it comes to collaboration video communications will ultimately dominate simply because it’s the most effective form of communications.
Channel partners tend to do especially well in the deployments involving multiple countries that require, among other things, integrations spanning several networks, says Sidwick.
Of course, competition across the unified communications sector is already fierce in a category where margins are already thin. But like most things involving recurring revenue models these days, wherever there is scale, there tends to be profitability.
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