AFTER 20 years of selling direct, UK cloud communications specialist Foehn has launched into the reseller channel and has its sights set on IT resellers.
Leading the charge is former VersaTel and Telcoinabox channel developer Brian Rocks (pictured), Head of Channel Sales at Foehn, who believes the traditional reseller market for hosted or cloud-based communications has hit a competitive high.
“Suppliers have saturated a market that is now pushing prices down and putting reseller margins at risk. An explosion of new product features, increasing technical complexity and marketing noise serves to confuse end users who seek simplicity,” he said.
“It’s no secret that many IT resellers, not normally associated with comms, are now ready to take on the hosted proposition. Thanks to the accessibility of the cloud, the expanding scope of collaboration systems and the progress of WebRTC, voice and comms are often sharing the same space dominated traditionally by productivity software and the big operating systems.”
Rocks maintains that in the past, IT resellers were often apprehensive about working with voice, but such views have changed along with the domination big vendors once enjoyed.
“It was a different world then. Now that voice is an application, often integrated with other business processes, interest is growing amongst IT resellers, managed service providers (MSPs) and network providers. These are the comms resellers of the future.
“Agility, customisation and personal service are the three weak spots in the armour of the big vendors. In turn, this can leave their resellers wanting when it comes to responsiveness and bespoke solutions.
“At Foehn, we keep development in-house and build solutions around opensource architecture. Together, these factors help us stay agile and flexible when it comes to requests for integration and customisation of our systems.”
Rocks is promising committed partners a route to success with a 30-day programme established on Foehn’s market experience in the hosted space.
“Most vendors offer some kind of reseller marketing support but, so often, this places the onus on the reseller to have digital marketing skills, compliant prospect data or simply more hours in the day.
“We’ve had twenty years to master the sales and marketing of cloud communications. We take that experience and offer it in a package of sales and marketing support that we tag the ‘30 Days to Revenue Success Plan.’ It’s a realistic claim we can support with many past examples and it’s something that gives resellers the confidence to invest effort.”