PRINTITRESELLER.UK 39 INTERVIEW A conversation with Intermedia Cloud Communications In an exclusive interview with PrintIT Reseller, Intermedia’s EMEA Sales Director Philippe du Fou, and Strategic Alliances Manager Noel O’Dwyer, discuss the opportunity for office technology dealers to expand their offerings into unified communications and collaboration (UCaaS) solutions. Here’s an excerpt of the discussion PrintIT Reseller (PITR): Can you tell me a bit more about Intermedia and your UCaaS offering? Philippe du Fou: I’ll begin by explaining what UCaaS is. UCaaS provides the ability to communicate with whatever device you have, so it could be a physical DECT phone, or using a mobile on your laptop, for example, it could be using a mobile phone or even using your web browser to communicate, make and receive calls. You may be using instant messaging for a one to one chat – all in real‑time. You can also do things like video collaboration, or file sharing, lots of things all combined into a single solution that makes it much easier for employees to communicate with each other and also with customers. And that gives you the ability to work from wherever, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re working from home, working from a company location, or working from a customer site, you can be reachable and helping customers all of the time. Intermedia has been in business for many years and over 20 years in the UK market. We’ve got about 1,400 employees worldwide and are present in the UK in the US, Canada, Australia and in Eastern Europe. We’ve got datacentres globally, so we ensure that we have datacentres close to our customers for better reliability. And what is interesting is that 40% of our staff are in R&D and that’s what makes us stand out from other providers. PITR: What is the UCaaS market opportunity? Philippe du Fou: We think there’s about 20 million telephony business users that have moved to the cloud, moved to unified comms as-a-service. That’s roughly about 5% of all users worldwide, so there’s a huge market potential and we see that gaining faster traction with the PSTN switch-off. BT, for example is switching off PSTN access by January 2027. This means that companies need to be able to move to the cloud and then move to a new SIP provider to be able to work and better benefit from the digital transformation that we’re seeing. PITR: Why should print resellers be looking to add UCaaS to their offering? Noel O’Dwyer: My role is to build brand recognition for Intermedia in the office equipment dealer channel. And in that role, I attend a number of copier dealer association events throughout the year. And what we’re seeing and I think you’re seeing it in the UK as well, is these organisations are evolving from being pure copier dealers to office technology dealers. When you think about it, the most fundamental element in any office workspace is the phone system. Some people need copiers, but every employee needs a phone and a means to communicate. And as Philippe touched on earlier, communication isn’t just done on the phone system anymore, there’s email and chat, and employees need to be able to share files, so UCaaS provides for all of this. So, this is a very natural evolution for the office technology dealers into a new marketplace, in a massively growing market. This is a phenomenally growing market driven by two major market trends - the transition to the cloud and evolving hybrid workspace. It is estimated that the market opportunity is approximately $80 billion and growing at approximately 30% per year. PITR: UCaaS is delivered as a SaaS model, how easy is it to onboard a new customer, does it require the reseller to invest in infrastructure or upskill in any way? Philippe du Fou: We provide our partners with the marketing tools and the sales and training certification free of charge and make it very easy for them so they know the upfront costs. We also give them a quoting tool so they can easily provide a customer with a quote with a simple mix and match licensing and if the customer is happy with it, they can click on that quote and turn it into a real account in just a few minutes. In terms of investment, all the technology is hosted by us in our datacentres worldwide. So, the partner doesn’t have to invest into the servers, into the security, that’s something that we do ourselves and we make it available very simply, on a per-user per‑month basis which provides continued... We think there’s about 20 million telephony business users that have moved to the cloud, moved to unified comms as-a-service
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