What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing Cloud Communications: Intermedia's Partner-First Strategy and AI Innovations Transforming UCaaS and CCaaS Markets
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets of cloud communications with Scott from Intermedia as he reveals the strategies behind their partner-first approach. Discover how Intermedia is empowering small and medium-sized businesses by supporting a vast network of VARs and managed service providers. Scott takes us through the integration of traditional telecom players, offering flexible models that preserve strong customer relationships. Gain insight into the evolving communication technology landscape and learn how Intermedia is leveraging AI innovations to enhance customer experiences and internal collaboration.
Get ready for a glimpse into the future of UCaaS and CCaaS markets with Scott's expert advice for IT service companies. As Intermedia continues to push the boundaries of innovation, find out how their partnership with Microsoft is setting new standards for telephony features within Microsoft Teams. With a focus on continuous development, Scott shares the thrilling journey of keeping up with an ever-changing product roadmap, celebrating past achievements and gearing up for groundbreaking updates. Don't miss this episode packed with valuable insights and exciting prospects in cloud communications.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, fascinating chat with a fascinating company today, intermedia, who are making waves in the UCaaS and CCaaS world. We're going to talk strategy, go-to-market marketing and more. Scott, how are you? I'm great. Nice to talk to you, evan. Good to talk to you. Good to see you Been a big fan of your team and your mission for many years. For those who may not be familiar with Intermedia and the work you're doing, how do you describe yourself these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Intermedia is a cloud communications company. Our solutions are voice video chat, secured storage and we also have a big host of Microsoft Hex business as well. And our audience. Although we sell to most businesses or businesses of all sizes, our sweet spot is small and medium businesses.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, often overlooked in this wonderful tech wave we find ourselves in, and so talk more about that. How do you set yourself apart in the business to business world Very crowded at all levels, but part in the business-to-business world very crowded at all levels, but particularly in the SME, smb world. What's your unique sort of selling proposition these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you had mentioned that quite often there's a run for the enterprise customers, but there are millions of SMBs out there. If you think of your local doctor's office, dentist's office, accountant, pizza parlor what have you? Those businesses also need technology, they have communications needs, they have customers, they work internally, they need to communicate and quite often those businesses are underserved. So our secret sauce is the way we go to market. So we have a great product and we talk about that all day long, but our secret sauce is we go to market through partners.
Speaker 2:So 85% of our business is going to market through VARs and managed service providers, and the reason they are so important is because they are located in the communities where these small businesses are located. A lot of commerce gets done on trust and word of mouth and a lot of small businesses don't have, obviously, enterprise IT organizations. So the VARs and the MSPs become their trusted technology supplier. We establish relationships with a broad network of 7,500 different partners across the US and abroad and by doing that we engage with MS or with the small and medium businesses, and many, many of them use our solutions.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, I'll have to take a look as a small business owner myself. You often talk about a partner-first approach. What does that mean? People talk about partners, but what are some of the best practices for partner-led go-to-market, and why is it so?
Speaker 2:important for you at Intermedia? Well, it's most important because our success depends on the success of our partners. So I think partner-first means it has to be in your company's DNA. I've been around Silicon Valley in marketing for a very long too long to even mention and I've been in a lot of companies where partners are part of it. But it may be a hobby or it may be a small part of the company.
Speaker 2:With ours, partners are again, the success is a large part of our business. So waking up every morning thinking about how we're going to serve the partners so that they can serve their end customers is absolutely critical, and in our case, we spent years and years and years doing a lot of things. So number one is training for partners. We offer private label everything, so products they can either sell you intermediate branded or their own private labeled solution Marketing. So we support our partners for marketing. We have assets where they can run campaigns off of our tools or connect social, and we have hundreds of assets that again they can use, private label or intermediate branded.
Speaker 2:We have administrative tools so our partners can manage their own billing, quoting, support of their particular customers. They can add lines, they can remove lines, they can shift lines around, they're in complete control. And then also support. So we have eight years that we've been certified by JA Power for exquisite technical support and that we provide to our partners so that they can provide that same level of support to their customers, so prevalent throughout our entire organization. It's all of these things that support our partners to make them wildly successful. That makes us wildly successful. That's not partners as a hobby, that's partners as core to who we are, throughout our DNA.
Speaker 1:Great. Well, what a win-win that is. So look at the traditional telecom or, you know, cloud communications market. You had agents and resellers and VARs. How do all these folks fit in these days in the, you know, modern approach that you're taking to UCAS and CCAS?
Speaker 2:Well, they're still absolutely important. As I mentioned, the partners that we're working for have become more or less the local IT organization for small and medium business and the VARs, the MSPs. Some of them have voice. If they don't, then we need to train them up on voice. It's pretty easy for them to get in and serve their organizations. They often have a lot of adjacent products, so they might be offering network solutions or security solutions or compute solutions, some are managed print, et cetera. So first of all we have to be attractive to those partners. So we have a great business model that we offer for partners.
Speaker 2:You mentioned agent. So if a partner wants to be third party commission and they bring in the lead and they want a commission and they get a spiff from us and we manage the billing and we manage the support, they can do that. We also offer another option for them which a lot of partners have taken us up on. We call it core, so it's customer owner reseller model. So we essentially offer our solutions wholesale to these partners. They brand the solution, they can bundle it, they determine the pricing with their solution and then they handle the billing and they handle first line of support. That way they are the face of the customer and when you talk about them having a whole suite of solutions whether it's security or whether it's networking, et cetera and they're the face of the customer we offer that through our solutions as well, and a lot of SaaS providers have an agent-only model. We have a lot of partners who want to be agents. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So you have lots of partners. So I hate to ask you to call out your favorite children in particular, but any stories or anecdotes or examples of some of those partners that you could talk about?
Speaker 2:I'll speak from a marketing perspective right now. So we in the marketing organizations we have tools where partners can come in and self-serve and download just about anything Pitch decks and and videos or or brochures or whatever run campaigns et cetera. But we also have a field marketing organization where we show up with our partners and we offer to help them. Quite often when we show up with our partners they are used to the suppliers that do the flyby. So it's some marketer who calls them and they drop a bunch of collateral on them and then they show up a quarter later and ask if they've used the collateral. We want to become part of their team. So that's from a marketing perspective, from a sales perspective.
Speaker 2:It's the same. We're helping our partners sell. For those who don't know voice as well, we get in there. We can become the expertise that helps them. We do training, we are on the ground with them doing training and our executives are always out with our partners engaging them. I think the secret sauce is at all levels of business, for UCAS and CCAS. For us, we're in there helping our partners to build their professionalism, to understand it, to build their expertise and to be able to close business with their end customers. That's where success ranges. Just as those partners are establishing trust within their community over time, we establish trust with our partners by earning it every day. In fact, we don't require contracts, so we earn our partner's business and our customer's business every single month and we have industry-leading low churn because they just stay with us.
Speaker 1:Wow, no lock-in, come on, that's unheard of.
Speaker 2:Right, I know Crazy talk, let's talk about the market. Wow, no lock-in.
Speaker 1:Come on, that's unheard of, right? I know crazy time. Um, let's talk about the market. I mean ucas is rapidly being commoditized. Uh, ccas are a lot of action and excitement, particularly around ai. Do you see these as two sides of the same coin? Or how do you see positioning of CX versus traditional, what we call telephony?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's all about communication and it's become an omni-channel world, right? So, whether you're dealing with customers or you're collaborating internally the chat, the video conferencing, like we're doing here right now voice, it's all there. We work with, for example, a Major League Baseball team it's all there. I, we work with, for example, a major league baseball team. I was talking to the, the, the head, the fan experience technology VP of fan experience technology for a major league baseball team, and that individual was saying, whether it's internal or external, whether it's spring training or something else, there is so much communication going on and when somebody picks up a phone, they need somebody else to answer that phone, or a video conference needs to have or file needs to be shared. So communication is more important than ever before.
Speaker 2:I see it a little bit as two sides of the same coin and, as you know and you're going to see with the events that we just talked about, that you're going to AI is changing the world right now. So one of the things that we're focused on here is not only delivering AI features and functionality, so real-time note-taking and consolidation of comments or sentiment analysis for somebody calling in a contact center so you can understand if they're upset or if they're happy, and coach the agent who's talking to them. Ai agents are becoming a wave. We have to help our partners understand AI, how it's going to affect their customers, and help them get a different level of muscle around AI, as this wave changes everything for all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exciting times, and we're not going to dive into the tech today, but I am curious. Maybe give us a peek behind the scenes into your R&D and product development group. I think you have a very deep bench when it comes to your team as well as your finances. What are you investing in these days behind the scenes?
Speaker 2:There's a couple of things we're investing in. So one is we have an integrated platform that's unified communications and contact center fully integrated. We also have archiving integrated with all of that. If you think of all the data that comes in through the chats, through recorded phone calls with customers, et cetera, the ability to go back for compliance purposes or if you get challenged, et cetera, to go get specific data or conversation. That's important. So archiving is integrated through and we've integrated all of this and embedded it with Microsoft Teams. So Teams is out there. Everybody has Microsoft Office. Microsoft has sold Teams as a bundle and now we have integrated telephony embedded within Microsoft and Contact Center for the whole suite to come together if that's an option. So we have a lot of flexibility in the packages that we offer.
Speaker 2:And then, as we just mentioned, ai is another thing that we invest in. I want to say this as well. So we do invest heavily in R&D and development. This industry is moving very quickly and we have our IP and that's important. But one of the things when we think about being a partner first organization is we have a advisory board, partner advisory board for our products. So our partners heavily influence our roadmap. They're telling us what's out there on the streets, what they need. And they are with all of our engineers and our product leaders and they are helping us determine the priorities and our roadmaps. And that goes hand in glove with being a partner-first organization.
Speaker 1:Interesting, and you mentioned Microsoft. Of course, there are a lot of big tech giants interested in CX and communications and collaboration these days, so it sounds like you're partnering with Microsoft or adding value or working with Microsoft partners. Maybe talk about that. That sounds interesting as well.
Speaker 2:So I'll start with the history of the company. The history of the company started with hosted Microsoft Exchange, so we are a very large partner with Microsoft. We have a very good relationship with them, going back decades actually, and so that's on the Microsoft Exchange side and hosted exchange. We sell Microsoft 365 as well, and as we went into the unified communications and contact center world, what we recognized is there's a lot of Teams users that are using the chat functionality of the Teams piece. But there's a telephony side too and we fit very nice into Microsoft Teams and we are able to provide the advanced business functionality, telephony functionality with voicemails, with advanced hunt groups, et cetera, that work well with Teams. That's fully integrated and we're finding that with Teams users with chat, they want this telephony functionality. Our partners are saying there's a demand for it, customers are saying there's a demand for it, so that's one of the options that we offer.
Speaker 1:Brilliant it. So that's one of the options that we offer. Brilliant, so, I guess. A final thought if you're a IT services company and maybe want to delve into the world of UCaaS and CCaaS, how should they get started? What are some of the pitfalls to watch out for? How do you build a practice around this space?
Speaker 2:Well, as you said, it's a crowded market. Well, as, as you said, it's a it's a crowded market, um, so so I don't know if we would encourage it companies to come into this space. Um, but you have to have a great product, you have to understand the market. Uh, for us, uh, we very, we focus very much on our go-to-market. How do we reach these small and medium businesses? It's through the partner channel. I would say if you want to be a channel first company, like we do, um, it's a big investment for us. It's through the partner channel. I would say if you want to be a channel first company, like we do, it's a big investment for us. It's been years of investment and development and the tools that support our partner. But wake up every day again with the DNA of supporting your partners and knowing what makes them tick and how they're going to support those small and medium businesses and invest and earn their trust every day.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So what are you excited about as we head into Q2 and the rest of the year? Lots going on, lots of events, lots of news announcements. What's on your radar?
Speaker 2:What's on my radar is we have such a solid roadmap so I can't reveal all this stuff that's on our roadmap, all the products and launches that are coming on our roadmap, but we have a lot to share in the coming year. But, being a marketer, one of the things that's exciting is when your engineering and your dev and your product resources have an active roadmap and there's always new features and functionality coming out. At Intermedia, we have new features and functionality coming out all the time. Very exciting stuff Keeps me and my team busy, keeps us busy, announcing it to our partners and to our customers and making sure they understand it, being able to go out and engage and have conversations about it. We have a lot more in store in the coming year and so you're going to hear a lot from us. I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1:I can't wait. It's very exciting. Congratulations on all the success and news and announcements and good luck onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Thank you, evan, appreciate it. It was great talking to you today.
Speaker 1:Likewise Thanks Scott, Thanks everyone for listening, watching and