We got such a great response to my last column about smartsourcing. Smartsourcing – if you didn’t know – is when partners flexibly outsource specific elements of technical operations.
The great thing about smartsourcing is that it’s different things to different people – a business accelerator or a business enabler; a resourcing backfill or a key strategic capability.
What’s really exciting is how comms smartsourcing is bringing new faces into the market, leveling the playing field for those without comms and telco expertise.
Here’s how we see comms smartsourcing supporting the evolution of the industry landscape in 2022.
FTTP players with voice obligations and opportunities
We’re seeing a lot of activity from an increasingly competitive FTTP marketplace of providers. A common challenge is the need to facilitate voice services as well as broadband. And that’s the whole end-to-end provision by the way, delivered as a managed service, from order provisioning to hardware staging, onboarding support and in-life care.
These guys want to focus on building out and providing access to their fibre networks – not learning how to be a telco. Many want to offer these services despite having no intention to make them a core part of their internal skillset.
Tech giants cornering the 'voice services' market
Perhaps the biggest impact will come from the tech giants reshaping the market for voice services. We’ve seen this most notably via Microsoft and its Teams platform, but don’t discount further moves from the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Currently these players are B2B focused when it comes to UC and contact centre; not really focusing on residential communications services – at least not yet. This could change very rapidly, using smartsourcing to achieve it.
IT specialists and MSPs with no telephony heritage
Another group capitalising on smartsourcing is a broad church of IT-centric suppliers. This includes MSPs, IT system integrators and traditional VARs – even boutique consultancies specialising in cybersecurity, DevOps and infrastructure.
What they have in common is zero heritage in voice, telephony, telecoms and telcos. Smartsourcing helps them complete their propositions without learning or internally resourcing new disciplines.
Comms players acquiring and retaining more customers
Last but by no means least are the core constituency of comms partners. For them, smartsourcing is a lever to support greater customer acquisition, customer retention or both.
Comms partners are different because they possess the appropriate technical skills; they understand their products and know how to implement and support them.
But that doesn’t make it easy to achieve, especially when they’re focused on growth, finding it hard to recruit good technical people, and under pressure to divert finite resources to presales and firefighting and away from onboarding, project management and customer success.
Want to know more about smartsourcing? Get in touch and find out how we can help.