Vonage this week moved to unify its disparate channel programs as part of concerted effort to foster more collaboration across more than 2,000 channel partners.
The Vonage Partner Network will also provide the mechanism through which Vonage will significantly expand its channel efforts beyond agents to focus more attention on managed service providers (MSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and value-added resellers (VARs), says Bob Crissman, senior vice president and chief channel officer at Vonage.
The goal, says Crissman, is to encourage partners to collaborate on selling solutions based on the unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) cloud services that Vonage exposes via application programming interfaces (APIs).
“We’re trying to bring all our partners together,” says Crissman. “We’d like to be able to pair agents up with other partners.”
Vonage already has 25 channel managers on staff and is working with 30 master agents and thousands of subagents.
Agents can exercise a lot of influence, but when it comes to building actual solutions most of don’t have a lot of technical capability. Vonage has been reaching out to other types of partners via multiple channel programs. But by unifying all those programs Vonage is hoping that there will be more mutually beneficial interactions across its channel, says Crissman.
In general, UCaaS is a boon to the channel because as communications shifts into the cloud more of these services are being consumed both directly and within the context of other applications. That latter approach, however, requires application development expertise that is in short supply in most of the channel programs created by carriers. That issue has become more pressing now that many providers of networking gear such as Cisco, cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and application providers such as Microsoft have all identified unified communications delivered via the cloud as a major opportunity for expansion.
The goods news for channel partners is there’s no shortage of providers of UCaaS services vying for their support. The bigger opportunity, however, may come in the form of stitching multiple disparate UCaaS services together at a time when interoperability standards between these services are still in a state of flux.
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