technologyreseller.co.uk 09 INTERVIEW Continued... TR: What are the fastest growing parts of your product portfolio now? And do you expect that to continue? JC: CCaaS is the main area. It is a £1.7 billion business in Europe today and is set to grow at 17% to 18% over the next three years. That presents a lot of opportunities, not just with the CCaaS service but also with the ecosystem that sits around that, whether that’s attaching hardware or delivering implementation services. And, of course, UCaaS continues to grow. While we’ve seen the ASP for the average seat price come down, the opportunity for continuous deployment around a set of UC solutions is key. TR: It’s interesting what you said earlier about there being fewer meeting rooms globally. What do you think the future of work is going to be and what impact might that have on your specialisms? JC: Without a doubt, we’re in a flexible working mode now. There are numerous benefits to having people in the office – faster decision-making, water-cooler discussions, the energy you get from colleagues. And as much as I love video technology, it’s very difficult to replicate those benefits consistently over video or UC. At the same time, employees require and expect flexibility. At Nuvias UC, we favour three days in the office and two days at home (unless we are visiting customers or vendor partners, of course), but I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all approach. Every company will be different and the divisions within those companies – finance, operations, marketing etc. – might also be different. So, we will continuously evaluate what we do, especially by division. The UC market – and let’s use that as a catch-all for telephony, meetings, chat, communications – is going to have to continue to develop to meet customer demands around flexibility and work. The growth stats for Teams and Zoom show how far that’s come already. And that will continue to grow. The next leap is around AI. We spend a lot of time talking about AI, the technology, and perhaps not enough time talking about the gain for people, which is increased productivity. In our business, we’ve already started to implement things like Copilot and Zoom AI to be able to summarise meetings, which is a fantastic tool, and we’re also using AI for data analysis and data crunching. We’re a great example of how CCaaS is now a solution for businesses of any size, not just (very) large enterprises, and as we deploy a new CCaaS solution internally, we can start to use AI to build great customer interactions that feel very natural and help customers get the answers they want really quickly. We can also use it to improve our sales capability. As we bring new people into the business, AI can help us analyse the sales calls they have and provide advice on how they can do better next time. What we’re doing is obviously being replicated by other businesses, so the opportunity for the channel to help technology has been around for 10, 15, 20 years, and CCaaS offers the ability to deploy that in the cloud and provide much better functionality and a much better customer experience. What’s interesting for us is how that technology scales down to the mid-market and smaller companies, which is a much bigger opportunity for the channel. CCaaS is a really big focus for us. Underpinning all of that is our services capability, which is designed to extend a partner’s capacity or capability in areas where they haven’t skilled up yet. CCaaS is a great example of that. So, to answer your question, we are really focused on those four pillars and we’re working with our key vendor partners on expanding their solutions inside those ecosystems and taking them to market. But we will be doing that selectively. Our role is not to offer every competing vendor. We want to be super specialist at the portfolio vendors that we bring on in those four technology areas. TR: How important is your services capability to overall revenue and is that side of the business growing? JC: It’s roughly 30% of our business right now and it’s definitely growing. Our service strategy is designed to extend the capacity or the capability of our partners, for example with implementation, migration and device management services. In Germany, we recently completed a 13,000 Skype for Business to Teams migration on behalf of a reseller for a very large engine manufacturer, and we are running a 24/7 managed service for those Teams devices as well. What we’ve also done is aggregate our services delivery teams across Europe. Before, we had a good service business in the UK and a very service-rich business in Germany from our acquisition two years ago of Alliance Technologies, now Nuvias UC Germany. From January, our services capabilities are going to be aggregated into one services team across Europe, giving us the ability to scale resources better, address customer needs much faster and crosspollinate our services into different regions, including France and the Netherlands where we also operate.
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