With such a wide-ranging field of technology providers serving the unified communications spectrum, we felt dealers and resellers would benefit from an overview of some of the most notable providers to the channel—RingByName, RingCentral, Konica Minolta and Intermedia.
As a supplement to our State of the Industry report, we offer this roundtable Q&A to help dealers and resellers sort through some of the many options at their disposal. The topics will touch on each vendor’s value proposition, how they facilitate reseller success, their points of differentiation and the key to growth in the SMB space.
Our panel consists of Felipe Godoy, vice president, business development and sales engineering for RingByName; Zane Long, senior vice president of global partner sales, RingCentral; Phil Luzius, national practice director, unified communications, Konica Minolta Business Solutions; and Mark Sher, senior vice president, product marketing for Intermedia.
Provide an overview of your unified communications platform, including when it was created as well as your menu of products and services.
Godoy: RingByName was launched in 2011 as a subsidiary of our parent company InPhonex Group, one of the oldest internet telephone service providers (ITSPs) in the industry, and was intended to be “Way more than a business phone service.”
While many other competing providers and products offer phone service, RingByName isn’t just a hosted phone system, but a suite of software tools that allows businesses to win and keep more business. These tools sit on top of one of the most robust and reliable telecom platforms in the world.
Our full suite of services includes IP-delivered dial-tone and analog faxing, hosted PBX, video conferencing, business text messaging, CRM, contact center and business intelligence tools normally reserved for large and expensive phone systems at significantly higher price points.
Long: RingCentral was founded in 1999. Born in the cloud, we hold decades of experience building reliable cloud communications networks across our geographically redundant global data centers and have delivered on our 99.999% uptime SLA for the past 12 quarters.
Today, our bread and butter is an integrated video, message and phone solution we call RingCentral MVP. It’s a single application employees can use to collaborate with teammates around the globe via whatever mode they need to get the job done: phone, video, chat, SMS or fax—all from the cloud. When integrated with our contact center solutions, RingCentral provides a comprehensive UC and CC approach to keeping business communications simple yet effective.
Finally, for customers that don’t require phone services, we offer RingCentral Video, a free and unlimited video and team messaging app. Backed by the same technologies that make up our MVP service, RingCentral Video ensures communications are always available and secure, even in our decentralized world.
Luzius: Konica Minolta has more than 15 years of experience providing telecom and unified communications solutions to a wide variety of clients throughout North America.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with clients of all sizes, from small legal firms to large school districts within numerous verticals including finance, legal, education, manufacturing, health care and nonprofit. This has enabled us to learn from a diverse set of organizations in order to continuously improve our platform and overall client experience. We’re adaptable and capable of growing with our clients’ organizations as they continue to expand into new technology around AI/ML as it becomes available.
When creating our unified communications platform, we entered into a partnership with Cisco to serve as the backbone of it. This provides unique benefits when compared with other market leaders. Cisco currently holds a commanding 59% of the global market share for this type of product and is committed to maintaining this dominance. This partnership allows us to leverage their vast research and development efforts–in addition to our own–to create a complete product with a large variety of features and functionality that competes with all the major market providers today.
Taking our product beyond technical capabilities, we pride ourselves on accessibility and repeatable processes. All clients are assigned a dedicated point of contact that will lead them through the onboarding experience. Additionally, network engineers are available to work through any technical complexities. Our approach provides clients with that extra level of personal attention that ensures a high level of satisfaction and unbeatable quality of service.
A long list of features and educational materials can be found at www.kmvoice.com.
Sher: Our solution is called Intermedia Unite, and we also offer a version (Elevate) that can be sold under the partner’s brand. Over the past 20-plus years, we’ve been evolving to become better and smarter in writing and running our own software and network. We’ve been doing it longer than most, and the fact that we were born in the cloud is especially important. We’re not a hardware-based company that decided to pivot to the cloud; it’s in our DNA.
We have a full stack of unified communications and collaboration systems. When you think about what the modern business needs, it boils down to two things. One, companies need to make sure that employees can communicate and collaborate with each other, even if they’re not in the same office. That entails calling, instant messaging, jumping on a video meeting, even co-editing files. The second requirement is to make sure a business’ outside customers can connect with them, regardless of where they are. We have the capability to take inbound calls, inbound emails, text messages and web chat, and get it to the right people at the right time. Our platform is an all-in-one application, a desktop/mobile app, and we make it so people in the organization can easily communicate and collaborate with each other.
Tell us a little about your relationship with the dealer/reseller community, from training through support. How do you enable its success, and what best practices do you stress?
Long: At the core of our Partner Program is my philosophy of Channel Harmony, which makes it easy for partners to work with RingCentral, eliminating conflict with direct sales. Through Channel Harmony, partners have access to a wealth of invaluable marketing, sales and positioning resources housed on our Partner Portal. Throughout the year, we also host a number of channel events, during which our partners can meet with RingCentral experts and other channel peers to build those relationships that underpin our shared success. With a world-class team of dedicated partner managers, account executives and subject matter experts at their disposal, partners have 24/7 access to experts who will help them succeed.
Finally, for SMB-focused or do-it-yourself-type partners, we also provide our IGNITE! Program. With IGNITE!, partners have a self-service, accelerated path to selling RingCentral in which they control the entirety of the sales cycle, enabling them to quickly start earning money and building their business.
Sher: We have two different ways we engage with our partners. The partner can act as a sales agent, selling our service and receiving a commission plus an upfront spiff. We also have a wholesale model—the dealer buys from us and resells with a markup, reaping a healthy margin. Most importantly, the dealer owns the relationship with the customer. If you become an agent for us or any other provider, you’re handing over the customer. You’ll make good money, but it’s not your customer anymore. In a resale model, the dealer is our customer. The dealer resells it under their brand, does all the billing and the first-level support, and owns the customer relationship. We take care of the rest, including telecommunications taxes, which can be tricky.
How we enable them is important. We look at it from a full 360-degree perspective. It starts with training through our Intermedia University, an online portal with segmented courses for sales, operations and onboarding. It is training tailored to job functions at a dealer. We also offer marketing support; the portal contains assets such as presentations, brochures and feature sheets. We also offer free, complete marketing campaigns which consist of four different emails, social posts, webinars and content dealers can put on their landing page. All the dealer needs to do is put their brand on it and they’re ready to go.
Dealers can also benefit from our quoting and ordering portal, through which their reps can do pricing and generate orders that are pushed into our system. It allows dealers to set their own pricing. We feel this completes the customer cycle—we teach dealers, help them market it, help quote an order and then onboard. We’re also their backup support—Intermedia has been recognized six years in a row by J.D. Power for technical support, which makes us fairly unique.
Luzius: We’ve been working in the Konica Minolta dealer/reseller channel for almost five years now and have developed strong relationships between resellers and our team. We work with our resellers and provide unfettered access to engineers, training materials, installation SOPs, marketing, business management tools and consulting. Our training programs utilize a mix of webinar-based classes and in-person workshops to empower them with expert knowledge of the product and enable successful solution selling. Our training programs are extensive for both new resellers and continuous improvement across our long-term channel partners.
We’ve also developed a comprehensive marketing program to help our resellers accelerate the new unified communications offering. This program includes an extensive library of white-label content for their marketing teams to leverage when creating their own branded collateral and localizing it for their client base.
Konica Minolta strives to deliver a turnkey solution that provides tremendous value to our resellers. We support them with pre-sales engineering and include dedicated project management, engineering and service desk resources to all their clients. This enables our resellers to focus on finding great opportunities without having to invest time and resources becoming a telecommunications expert overnight.
The best practices we stress revolve around people and processes. Many unified communications solutions have similar feature sets, so we focus on relationships with repeatable results. Our resellers love working with the people we have due to their experience and availability.
Godoy: RingByName strives to be not just a provider of services to the dealer/reseller community, but full-fledged partners. To that end, we’ve created what we call embedded teams—account, sales engineering and support staff that are assigned to each dealer/reseller in our network. They assist from the moment a prospect is identified and continue through maintenance and support.
In our two-plus decades of working with dealers and resellers, we’ve come to recognize the importance of a quick go-to-market strategy. The reseller’s technical knowledge and capabilities are provided and augmented by RingByName’s personnel, industry best practices and a bolstered set of proven processes, workflows and documentation created with years of continual input and feedback.
Our system allows customers to offer their clients a range of services—from basic dial-tone to large scale contact center solutions—while retaining full ownership over them.
What do you think separates your company from the broad field of technology providers to the dealer/reseller channel?
Luzius: The difference makers are people and processes.
Our team focuses on providing an exceptional client experience through dedication and caring. Project managers provide regular communications and will be there every step of the way. They handle the majority of project tasks and adapt to the level of engagement required by each reseller. Our support team is located in the United States and consists of professional engineers employed by Konica Minolta. They’re subject matter experts and can tackle complex issues; they’re not just customer service representatives opening a ticket with a third party. Our objective is to achieve a quick resolution by accessing all of our shared troubleshooting experience developed over the last two decades.
Our other standout attribute is our process-driven approach to project deployment and ongoing operations. We continually analyze our processes to identify opportunities for improvement and swiftly put them into practice. We provide guidance on industry best practices for network traffic, including the configuration of VLANs to segment voice traffic and improving QoS with session boarder controllers managing the edge of the network. We collaborate with our clients to identify and remedy issues instead of just pointing the finger at other service providers.
Godoy: I’d have to say the main differences that make us appealing to our dealer/resellers are:
- We have a variety of ways in which dealer/resellers can get to market. They can join as referral partners receiving revenue share for the life of any client referred to our team. Or they can generate significant revenue and maintain ownership of the client as a full reseller, setting their own pricing and receiving co-branded interfaces. What’s more, we can handle billing on their behalf through our billing platforms.
- RingByName isn’t a reseller of an underlying technology or of someone else’s platform. We’ve created everything and control it all—the telecom platform that controls the routing of calls, a metering platform that can be used to create custom plans and bill end-users on the dealer’s behalf, and the advanced software and analytics platform that drives our features. At the end of the day, that means RingByName is more responsive when it comes to the support and development of the product. There are no delays in opening tickets to resolve issues or request product improvements.
- Because of the strengths of RingByName as a software company, we’ve also made it a priority for our platform to be constantly improving and future-proof. Our engineers release a product improvement or new feature once every two weeks, and these are made available to RingByName dealers/resellers and their end-users automatically.
- Lastly, we’ve become known for our support to dealers and their end-users. Dealers have access to a dedicated team that supports all aspects of the dealers’ business, and we can provide support to end-users as the dealer. With support wait times under 45 seconds to reach a live support agent, dealers can feel confident informing their customers that RingByName will support their clients with the same high-level experiences they provide themselves.
Sher: It’s all part of how we go to market and engage with our partners. The dealer owns the customer relationship, and we support them. It’s quite unique, and it’s why we’re so successful. It’s also easier for dealers to bundle services, which is the ultimate goal. They can layer our services in with managed print and other services. Bundling is the holy grail for dealers, because that makes it much harder for point solutions to come into a customer’s business and erode wallet share.
From a technology perspective, we handle the customer’s internal and external communications through one app (mobile and desktop), and that’s pretty unique. Not many providers can do that in a nice, easy-to-use, elegant way. We’ve built and maintained our contact center software, the video conferencing software—all our unified communications tools. That way, we can integrate it and make it smart and easy for the customer.
Long: Since day one at RingCentral, my main mission has been to build a partner-first mentality into anything and everything we do. We strive to give partners everything they need to run their business their way while still applying our expertise and resources to springboard their success. Our product provides a more flexible approach to modern business communications, allowing partners to bring their customers into the cloud at the pace that best suits everyone involved.
The RingCentral Partner Program has earned CRN’s five-star rating for an impressive six years in a row. We’re the only purely cloud-based UCaaS solution that can tout such an achievement, and we have our excellent partners to thank for our success. Beyond that, we’ve also fostered several key relationships, namely with Avaya, Atos and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. These strategic partnerships provide channel partners with yet another way to bring customers to the cloud as seamlessly as possible.
With the growth in remote offices, what’s the key to dealers expanding communications solutions among their end-user clients? What are the greatest challenges they face in gaining traction among SMB clients?
Sher: The pandemic has really changed business’ attitudes toward remote work. Whenever I talk to partners or customers about communications, one thing I stress is flexibility. In dealing with any business continuity disruption, which changes the way you do things, how do you prepare for it? The answer is through flexibility.
Flexible solutions can ebb and flow and bend, but not break. A unified communications system is flexible and goes wherever you go, regardless of location, and that’s what the modern business needs. Whether the end-user is leveraging Intermedia’s desktop or mobile app, they can enjoy all the same features, including easy access to files wherever they go. Work doesn’t have to stop just because you’re stuck in Mexico due to a canceled flight.
Dealers need to stress the value of unified communications. Some clients will point out that the incumbent system they paid $20,000 or $40,000 for is paid off, so theoretically it’s free now. But they still have to pay for the phone lines, video conferencing, file storage and other disparate solutions. By having all that in one solution, the end-users can get rid of Zoom or Dropbox and the monthly per-user voice fee. When the dealer shows them the math, the customer could conceivably have a net-zero cost increase when they switch, and they’re going to get a lot more features for their money. That’s a compelling value proposition.
Long: End-user clients and partner organizations need to realize that work from anywhere is here to stay. Organizations that don’t adopt mobile-ready communications will soon find themselves unable to pull in new talent—and subsequently more business—in comparison to competitors that have fully embraced hybrid work.
Many organizations rushed to adopt a solution that met their bare minimum requirements. While this approach worked in the short term, those hasty decisions often prove inferior to a top-performing UCaaS solution, yet linger due to comfortability and resistance to change.
The easiest way dealers can expand communications solutions is by partnering with a relationship-first team that prioritizes their success, backed by a best-in-class cloud communications platform. RingCentral provides integrated, industry-leading UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, improving both customer and employee experience no matter the use case.
Godoy: The growth in remote work has led to dealers and their clients cobbling solutions together from several disparate providers—video conferencing from company A, business text massaging from company B—and trying to add it to their existing telephone system. This only creates unnecessarily complicated solutions for the client and often complicated billing and licensing.
Dealers can use their relationships as trusted advisors to provide clients with a solution that will address multiple, if not all, issues for the client while providing simplified single-source billing—and hopefully at reduced cost to the client. Most importantly, this allows the dealer to begin the journey from just a reseller of product to a managed service provider.
This isn’t without challenge. The dealer will get push back from clients who don’t see the value-add of Hosted PBX and other managed services, and who will only be interested in the lowest-cost solution. These customers may not be a good fit for managed services and will require education and development.
Another challenge in shifting to hosted or managed services is explaining the value of offloading the costs of on-premise hardware (the actual phone system in our case) to the cloud. This includes providing clarity on how these costs compare to the continued operating and maintenance costs of on-site hardware. Many customers have a hard time understanding this concept and will require the guidance of the reseller.
Luzius: When trying to capture more of the existing clients’ spend for communications solutions, we find the most success occurs after executing a strategic marketing and education campaign.
We include overall go-to-market planning for unified communications, customizing it to each reseller based on current industry trends for engaging and educating clients. Additionally, we offer resellers the ability to work with the Konica Minolta global marketing team to plan their digital marketing campaign and capture the interest of the client base.
The greatest challenge we see for our resellers is with perception. Increased focus must be given to how the reseller is viewed in the marketplace. Are you known as the go-to, trusted adviser for consulting on new technologies? This is the type of self-reflection we like to discuss when creating an effective plan for expanding unified communications sales and overall client education.
