technologyreseller.co.uk 09 INTERVIEW Services growth Meanwhile, services continue to be a key growth area for Nuvias UC, propelled by the evolution of Teams and Zoom into mission-critical communications platforms and supported by the creation of a single, pan-European services team responsible for delivering professional and managed services across the UK, DACH, Benelux, France and southern and eastern Europe. “Nuvias UC’s services business is going from strength to strength across Europe. Our Technical Services team now has over 417 technical accreditations from the likes of Zoom, Microsoft, Cisco, Poly HP, Yealink, Pexip and PRINCE2 Project Management. We've reached a milestone, over the last 12 months, of migrating more than 30,000 seats from legacy platforms to Microsoft Teams on behalf of partners. We also provide managed support services for more than a dozen customers, again on behalf of channel partners, monitoring and managing Teams-based devices on networks and resolving any issues that arise,” explains Chimoindes. “We’re going to carry on growing and investing in that part of our business because we believe it enhances the capability and the capacity of partners. Some will choose to offset professional services and managed services to us while they develop their own capabilities. Others will use Nuvias UC to expand their own capacity. There are some great examples in our German business of where we’ve worked with partners to address the needs of end users that have had trouble with migration and managed support and, with our services, have been able to help resellers secure those end users as customers for the next three to five years.” Market polarisation Services growth, especially around Teams and Zoom, is important as it allows channel partners to maintain revenue and margin in traditional areas that are experiencing downward price pressure, including meeting spaces. Chimoindes acknowledges the fall in average selling prices (ASPs) caused by new entrants looking to establish a market presence through aggressive pricing but says there is still plenty of growth in the meeting spaces market. “Still only 16% of meeting rooms have got adequate video capability, so that's a huge opportunity for us. When we talk about that market maturing, that's at a revenue level not at a unit level. Unit sales are still growing, and we expect that growth to be significant. But because ASPs (average selling prices) have come down there is a need to add services and other opportunities to maintain revenue and margin.” He also points out that because video is now mission-critical rather than a ‘nice-to-have’ a good quality meeting experience is essential. “The market will polarise. Yes, there will be a need for price-efficient units that can satisfy a certain customer need. But equally there will be a need for hardware that delivers a great user experience, with fantastic picture quality and the use of AI to mix camera feeds for greater meeting equity. If 50% of people attending a meeting are going to be remote, probably more, you need to create a great meeting equity environment. And to do that you need great solutions from people like HP Poly and Logitech.” To find out more about Nuvias UC’s solutions and services, please visit https://nuvias-uc.com. (CX) and the greater availability of agile, scalable, cloud-based solutions that are easier to deploy in SMBs. “We talk a lot about converged communications and CCaaS is a natural evolution of that, whether you're a telephony partner or a video partner. Take Zoom as an example. It started life as a meetings company and then transitioned to telephony and now to CCaaS as well. A lot of partners have gone through the same evolution. CCaaS feels like a natural extension to that whole unified comms portfolio, so if a partner is supplying video and telephony and they don’t do CCaaS someone else in their environment will.” Nuvias UC’s recently launched Pathfinder+ programme is expressly designed to help partners gain expertise in CCaaS and other growth areas. It is early days, but the distributor is already working with a dozen partners to help them strengthen ties with vendors, expand their capabilities and get to revenue more quickly. This is exactly what Nuvias itself is doing. It already acts as a distributor for Five9 and Zoom and is soon to announce new vendor partnerships in its CCaaS portfolio (as well as its UCaaS and meeting spaces offerings), while at the same time expanding its own CCaaS deployment through integrations with the company CRM system and AI. This investment should enable more productive interactions with partners, using chatbots, for example, to answer basic questions and AI to provide prompts and live feedback on sales calls.
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