Intermedia Cloud Communications, a leading provider of cloud communications, collaboration, and productivity solutions to over 135,000 businesses and 7,500 channel partners, announced a strategic expansion of its partner program tailored to meet the distinct challenges faced by Service Providers (SPs). With a proven track record of success in building cloud communications and collaboration businesses for partners, including many SPs, Intermedia is intensifying its focus on the SP community to help them deliver competitive and profitable unified communications, collaboration and customer experience solutions under their own brand.
Recognizing and Addressing Service Provider Pain Points
With an estimated 400M+ aging, inflexible, and costly legacy business phone system seats that have yet to migrate to a more mobile, secure, and reliable cloud-based way to work, the opportunity for SPs is significant. However, there are a number of current and future obstacles that SPs, in particular, must address in order to cost-effectively deliver and support modern unified communications solutions:
- Decline of the Softswitch Era: Traditional central office softswitch platforms face deprecation, pushing SPs to seek modern solutions.
- Inefficient Investments: Investments in voice infrastructure and supporting processes lack alignment with profitable growth.
- Challenges to Building Proprietary Solutions: Building their own solution is impractical, taking too long and costing too much.
- Brand Marginalization: SPs prefer to leverage their own brand, rather than simply reselling another vendor’s brand and diluting the SP’s brand equity.
- Customer Disintermediation: SPs are losing customers to over-the-top UCaaS providers due to limitations in the SPs’ current platforms.
- Critical Customer Ownership: Retaining customer ownership while maintaining brand is crucial for SPs.
“Amid the challenges in the Unified Communications space, Service Providers require strategic solutions to bring to their business customers,” said Rob Arnold, Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “It’s critical for Service Providers to find more than just a solution, they need a partner invested in their success and able to support them though the entire customer lifecycle.”
All-in-One Answer
As the partner-first provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, Intermedia is uniquely qualified to help a greater number of SPs deliver the unified communications solutions that their business customers are seeking and adopting in record numbers.
Intermedia’s award-winning, AI-powered, all-in-one communications suite features the communications, collaboration, and customer care solutions needed to help support a more mobile, efficient, and productive workforce, including voice, chat, SMS, video conferencing, contact center, file sharing and backup, multi-channel archiving, and more.
Couple this with Intermedia’s innovative reseller partner program and 360-degree approach to partner support, and the formula for SP unified communications success emerges. Highlights of Intermedia’s Partner Program for SPs include:
- Cloud-based solution: Intermedia’s solutions are consumed by SPs as they sell. No hardware to purchase, manage and maintain.
- Wholesale Model with Strong Economics: SPs purchase the solution wholesale from Intermedia, determine their sales prices, and own their customer relationships – helping to reduce churn and ultimately increase the SPs’ bottom-line profitability.
- Brand as Your Own: SPs are able to brand the solutions as their own to sustain and strengthen their market presence and differentiation.
- Customer Relationship Ownership: Partners retain ownership of the customer relationship and are equipped to provide high levels of customer satisfaction.
- Flexibility and Choice: SPs have the flexibility to set and manage pricing, bundle other services, and incorporate new offers into their portfolios.
- Comprehensive Support: Partners receive comprehensive sales, marketing, training, onboarding, ordering, billing, and seven-time J.D. Power-certified technical support – and much more – to help ensure lasting, differentiated, and competitive success.
- Reliability and Safety: Intermedia’s proprietary UC/CC stack, backed by 99.999% uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs), offers a secure and highly reliable platform for SPs and their customers.
- Bring Your Own PSTN: With Intermedia, SPs can choose to use their own trunks and DIDs or use Intermedia’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Jonathan McCormick, COO and CRO at Intermedia, commented: “As the cloud communications market continues its evolution, so do the incredible opportunities for Service Providers. This commitment to expanding our Partner Program for Service Providers underscores our promise to provide partners with the essential tools for recognizing and seizing the vast opportunities that the future of unified communications holds, and removing the obstacles that might get in their way.”
SOURCE: PRNewsWire