01732 759725 10 INTERVIEW customers with AI is phenomenal. In our industry, especially in the areas that we focus on, the effect of AI on people’s productivity is going to be huge. I often reference a reseller friend of mine who told me that one of the big differences post-COVID compared to pre-COVID is that now, when he goes to an end user to talk about a project, HR is involved in the decision-making process. And HR is involved because they want to understand whether the technology deployment is going to make employees’ lives easier or more complex. That’s a very different conversation to before, when decisions were with IT and potentially communications, with some input from finance. The portfolio of skills an AV or UC partner now needs to interact with an organisation has changed massively over the last five or ten years. To start with, a partner basically needed either great AV or great UC skills. Then, in 2007/2008 when devices began to be integrated into networks, that partner needed to develop IT networking and security skills. In 2015/2016, with the birth of platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, partners had to develop platform knowledge. Then, when COVID happened, they had to develop people knowledge as well. That folio of skills has developed massively over the last 15 years. TR: What other challenges do your reseller and MSP customers face right now? JC: Stating the obvious, the macroeconomic climate has played a big part in decision-making processes this year, especially at an enterprise level. When you have solutions that start to mature, like in the collaboration space, demonstrating your value in that space can become harder. If an end user can buy a solution for £1,000 from an online etailer, a specialist integrator really needs to be able to justify their value to the end user. So, we’ve got a maturing of the market in certain areas, and we’ve got new areas like CCaaS that are starting to come into the mid-market and below. Gaining skills and knowledge in those is going to be absolutely key. TR: How have these challenges affected your business over the last year? JC: We’ve had a tough year because the market has been tough for our partners and our vendors and because we’ve been through a transition in the last 10 months. I’ve come in and we’ve brought on board a new team, a CFO and a CIO who have helped to transform our logistics capability and implement a digital transformation strategy. Most recently, Wayne Gratton has joined as CCO to ensure a seamless flow between vendor management, marketing and partner enablement to help partners and vendors get to revenue quickly. TR: What has your digital transformation programme involved? JC: We are rebuilding our automation platforms from start to finish, from quote all the way through to order and invoice, to make sure we have more people focused on partner and vendor development than on processing pieces of paper. We have an ERP upgrade as well which, combined with our implementations of CCaaS and AI, will really help with automation and productivity. TR: What are your other targets and priorities for 2024? JC: At a technology level, to expand our ecosystems around the meeting space, UCaaS and CCaaS, and to expand our services capability there as well. We will continue to evolve the operations side of our business, our digital transformation, and this January we are launching a new channel enablement engine, Pathfinder+, to help partners make money in areas they may not have invested in before, like CCaaS. When you work with vendors on new partner acquisition, they will often ask you to find 100 partners to sell their solution. That can be quite easy to do, but the reality is it rarely generates the desired revenue and opportunity. Pathfinder+ is a nurture programme where we work with new and existing partners to provide them with the skills, the capability, the resources and the opportunities to help them get to revenue in new areas. We’ll run that with specific vendor partners and work with our reseller community to identify partners that want to grow and develop a business in specialist areas. This is very different from just recruiting 100 partners. It is a much more measured approach to generating opportunities that we can nurture and grow together. It’s something I’ve done in previous businesses and when you’re patient and get it right, it’s really beneficial for the reseller, vendor and the distributor, especially in new areas of business and especially, as we talked about earlier, when times are tough. Another priority is to continue to aggregate our different geographic businesses together to build a ‘one Nuvias UC’ team and to create a culture in which everybody has a voice, everybody feels included and everyone can contribute to the business. So far, we’ve done a lot to make sure there is trust throughout the business, because when you have trust, you can do anything. The other priority for me is creating an environment where people enjoy coming to work, no matter how tough it can sometimes be. Creating that environment for our people is absolutely key. TR: You’ve mentioned the success of your acquisition of Alliance Technologies in Germany. Are you considering M&A to expand your geographical coverage and gain additional capabilities? JC: M&A is never out of the question, but it’s not a focus for the short-term. Through the regions in which we operate today – the UK, DACH, Benelux and France – we already address 75% of the European market opportunity in UCaaS, CCaaS and meetings. So, our main focus this year is to be super-focused on our strategy and our capability in existing territories. continued...
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