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?
Transforming Business Through Unified Communications and AI
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unified communications doesn't have to be complicated or confusing. In this revealing conversation with Jason from Wildix, we explore how a channel-first approach is revolutionizing the way businesses communicate and collaborate.
Wildix has carved out a unique position in the crowded UCaaS market by committing 100% to its channel partners. "We are nothing without our channel," Jason explains, detailing how they've transformed from a reactive to proactive partner support model. Rather than competing with their partners, Wildix stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them, providing sales engineers, technical demos, and proof of concepts while allowing partners to maintain control of customer relationships, contracts, and pricing.
What truly differentiates Wildix is their practical approach to AI implementation. Instead of making sweeping promises, they focus on specific verticals where they can deliver measurable ROI. Their solution helps retail stores prevent theft and streamline training, while their sales-focused tools provide sentiment analysis and seamless CRM integration. As Jason notes, "We want to be laser focused where we feel we can make a difference."
For MSPs and VARs looking for alternatives to legacy vendors that are scaling back wholesale options, Wildix offers a refreshing alternative. With global-by-design solutions, remote-first company culture, and unwavering security standards (they're the only European company on the Gartner Magic Quadrant), they're helping partners deliver unified communications that truly transform businesses.
Ready to discover how a channel-first approach could transform your communications strategy? Subscribe to our podcast for more insights into the rapidly evolving world of business technology and unified communications.
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Hey everybody, today we're diving into the world of unified communications and collaboration with an update from a company that's a little new to me Wildix Jason. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm well, Evan. Thank you for having me on Appreciate the time.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for joining. We both have long backgrounds in unified communications and really keen to learn about you, your journey and the big idea at Wildix. Perhaps you give me a bit of an intro.
Speaker 2:Good. Yes, wildix is a communications organization where we sell voice video messaging capabilities through our channel to customers. We are 100% channel focused. Channel first for us makes us a differentiator, and one of our differentiators in the market is that we work solely with our partners. They empower us, they go to customer alongside us and we help them, support them, enable them to grow their businesses.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and you know what's the core mission at Wildix. That maybe differentiates yourself from a very crowded you guys landscape. You know lots of big tech giants crowding the field, but you guys are nevertheless pretty successful. What's been the secret sauce?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the main differentiator for us really is our go-to-market strategy, whereas a lot of our competitors are focused both from a direct and channel point of view, constantly creating a bit of a clash between those two go-to-market strategies. We are channel first. Everything we do is through our partners. Everything we do from a sales point of view has a partner behind it.
Speaker 2:We are nothing without our channel. From a technology point of view, we separate ourselves in two different areas. One, from a vertical point of view. We have growing solutions for sales as well as for storefronts, where we are able to provide technology that makes a true difference. We believe that the utilization of AI is not something that should just be a nice to have, but should be a differentiator for that business. It should make an impact on that business and what we are delivering with our vertical solutions truly does that for our customers. And then, finally, agentic AI, as that continues to grow within our business. As we embed it into our solution, it becomes native into our solution. It adds another layer to AI and our capabilities. That is truly leading the marketplace right now.
Speaker 1:Wow, there's a lot of cool stuff to unpack there. I'd be curious. You know about the traditional resale model that you alluded to and value-based selling. Clearly you're taking the latter approach. You know, traditionally agents and VARs have dominated telecom, but you're trying to help your partners be more consultative. You know solutions sales oriented but how does that work in practice? In reality?
Speaker 2:It's a great question, Evan. I come from a direct sale and agency sale point of view where we really took over opportunities for our partners. Right, they brought it to us and then we would take it over and run it. There wasn't a lot of collaboration In the wholesale resale. We are completely dependent. It is the partner's customer, it is their contract, their pricing. They drive the sales cycle. We are there to support them.
Speaker 2:Before I came to Wildix, we were very reactive in that relationship. If a partner needed something, we were there to help. If a partner asked us for something, we were able to deliver, Whether that was a product, ask a pricing, ask, support ask, et cetera. What I've done is enabled my team to be much more proactive. We've built out now a channel sales organization working through Salesforce, enabling our partners not only to be reactive but again being proactive in their opportunities, identifying opportunities that we can win. Now we can win bigger, we can win a little bit faster. We've added in additional folks like our sales engineers to be able to help support them from a technical point of view, to give demos run proof of concepts. So now it's not partner with Wildix behind them, but it's partner and Wildix side by side going to the customer. The partner still controls everything that I mentioned before, but we're there next to them, helping them win. It's only been about a year and a half since we've been running this program, but the results have been fantastic.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's extraordinary. So let's talk AI. You mentioned that and it's on every slide deck this year, but there is a real value, at least from the early adopters like ourselves here, you and I. I mean there's AI in every aspect of this podcast and video recording. It has some really cool capabilities capabilities I think the disconnect might be how the customers, particularly the you know, the enterprises, are being sold it. I mean, how do you position and integrate and sell ai in a practical, you know, partner-led project? I mean, what's, what's the communication there, both for the partner and the end user? That's beyond just the uh, it'll, it'll uh, you know, solve every problem you've ever had considered in your business.
Speaker 2:And I think that's what we're trying to stay away from. Right Is that we'll solve every problem or we'll be a thing that will, you know, make you more efficient or more productive. We want to do that, of course, but we want to be laser focused where we feel we can make a difference. In fact, some of our AI technology has come directly from partners working with their customers to make a request to us. Our Xhoppers solution is a great example of this. Xhoppers is built for storefronts, for retail right. It is giving them the ability to utilize a tool like AI to make them more effective at their job, but also seeing an ROI from that use, being able to prevent theft, training faster onboarding, faster right.
Speaker 2:Again, I go back to shrinkage in stores. All of these things not only are nice to have, but they're mission critical for retail right, especially in the US. It's tariffs and other price and inflation, and all these things are coming online. Having the ability to be able to save money where they can is a big differentiator for them. As I move into agentic AI, that gives our customers the ability to really hone in their people, to be able to make them more productive, without having the burden to go through chatbot and those kind of related functionalities where we can embed our agentic AI agents to be able to hold those conversations for them without having to have that human intervention, allowing people to be repurposed for much more productive use than they are today.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So you're really going after verticals and UCAS, as you know, might as well be a completely different application in hospitality versus retail or healthcare. How are you seeing the vertical adoption and how does that affect your go-to market and messaging and marketing and beyond?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so far, you know, we are concentrating our vertical in two places One within retail, as I mentioned, two within sales. Every business Now sales isn't really a vertical, it's more of a function of a business but we want to be able to identify those specific needs from those customers that have sales as a need which most businesses do and give them the tools that make them more productive, give them sentiment analysis, give them updated notes, give them the ability to interact with CRMs like Salesforce, being able to have that relationship that you can not have to live in multiple boxes or multiple windows, but one single pane of glass and host all of your communication needs out of. So we've been very laser focused when it comes to verticals. We also see success in healthcare, hospitality and others, but those are really the two that I named first, that we're implementing AI into.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, so I'm looking at your messaging. I mean speed to deployment and simplicity are recurring themes. I love that. What does that mean for your MSPs and VARs, who are on the hook to deliver that to their customers? How do you bake that into your offer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. It's imperative that we can get people up and running quickly, that we can drive user adoption. You know, for MSPs, not all of them have a large technical staff. Not all of them are going to be able to roll out large deployments very quickly. They want to be able to get their customers up and running because they need to solve a problem themselves. Being able to easily scale, easily deploy, both locally and then regionally, countrywide, globally, et cetera, gives our partners the ability to really focus on solutions rather than just solving a problem. And it gives them the ability to have these conversations with their customers that impact the entire business rather than location by location by location, and it further protects their margins and drives more value for the back-end work that they're doing for their customers. So that ability to deliver our solution quickly is very, very important to our MSPs.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So the other hot topics now for customer security and compliance never negotiable, but they're no longer just checkboxes. You really have to go deep into both of those topics. How do you think about those kind of customers and regulated sectors? I guess all of Europe is basically a regulated environment as well GDPR and more so how's that looking these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, listen, we are one. We're very familiar with security and with regulation. We know that we need to build a very secure, very reliable solution for our customers and we go to great lengths to ensure that it is the most secure solution in the world. Yes, we are the only still true, the only Gartner, or the only company on the Gartner Magic Quadrant out of Europe. We understand what it means to have compliance, what it means to meet regulations, and our secure, by design solution is a testament to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well done. So you know there's no shortage of UCAS vendors and it's a very changing environment Companies exiting the space, merging, acquiring other companies. Almost every week there's more news. How do you position yourself in such a noisy market and what's the biggest opportunity for yourself this year?
Speaker 2:yourself this year. Yeah, it's difficult, right, you know this. This is uh, there's a lot of people in this space. There's a lot of big names, right, granted, more more recognizable than ours. The space that we fit into, though, is a space that is being vacated by those other vendors, right, but they cannot fill.
Speaker 2:There are so many MSPs out there, so many partners that need a home, partners that are used to working with the Mitels, avaya, et cetera of the world, where they are scaling back their solution.
Speaker 2:They are not able to wholesale and resale those solutions as far as they used to be able to in the past, and they need a reliable cloud solution that can scale, but one that isn't forcing them into a box of agency or forcing them into a box of a referral sale. We know that we not only have the go-to-market down and we can help those partners who need that solution, but we have a fantastic product. When our product is put in front of customers, when our product is put in front of partners, it stands out as easy to use, easy to deploy and a powerful tool for their business, and I think, when you combine those two things, it allows us to really grow rapidly, both in the US and globally, because there again are so many partners that are looking for that type of solution for their own business and they're just not getting it from our competitors. So, yes, it's crowded, but we stand out in a very specific way that nobody else is really doing, specifically in the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and your global company. Tell us about your operations. Where's the teams? Tell us about your operations. Where's the team? Teams.
Speaker 2:And how do you support those global 2000 who want you know a footprint across many, many time zones? Yeah, so, while this grew out of Italy, it was conceived and built by two brothers, steve and Dimitri Osler. They moved the business to Tallinn, estonia. They believe in 100% remote. This is something I've kind of had to get used to. I'm an old school guy. I like going into the office, seeing people. But they believe in 100% remote.
Speaker 2:All of us can work from anywhere. They expect us to do our jobs. They drive productivity, they drive ambition, they drive us being first and leading, and they lead from the front in that way. But they're also huge advocates of work-life balance and ensuring that people can work from where they need to and work how they need to. As long as we can get the job done, that's all that really matters. And so we've grown the business organically that way. We've also grown through our partnership program, and our partners then become an arm to our business.
Speaker 2:I see us growing immensely in the UK, in Europe and then in the Americas, and in terms of how we work with companies on a larger scale and on a global scale. That's where our ClassSound product comes into playLA, and it is global out of the box. There are no zones, there are no local, international dieting. Everything is global out of the box, and so companies that are expanding, whether it's through Europe or globally, or even us, canada, central South America. As soon as you have that, not only do you have a very reliable, very scalable solution, but again it's delivered as global out of the box, which is a huge differentiator for those global companies.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. What a one-stop shop, incredible.
Speaker 2:What are you looking?
Speaker 1:forward to as we head into the summer month. Busy conference season behind us, another one coming up. What's on your mind the rest of the year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm looking forward to one seeing a lot of our partners. We do an enablement program called Sales Academy, sales Elevate Lab. It's the Sales Academy. It's our desire to enable our partners and give them a sales methodology that's not only going to benefit their endeavors with Wildix but their businesses overall. So I've had the opportunity. I was in Nashville last week. I'll be going to Barcelona tomorrow, rome next week. So busy, but getting the opportunity to sit down, hear from partners what's working, what's not. This is one of my more favorite times of the year because I really get to hear from the people on the ground and really learn from them and spend a lot of time picking up what we need to in order to deliver better partnership to them. So that's really what I'm looking forward to. Excuse me, Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on all the success. Hopefully you have some downtime as well after the busy travel season and onwards and upwards at wild eggs. Thanks so much, jason thank you and thanks everyone for listening and watching, take care.