Chief Marketing Officer Simon Blackwell and Head of Product James Lockhart explain how owning its own IP enables Nebula Cloud to be more agile and responsive to the needs of its channel partners and their customers
Nebula, a provider of cloud-based workplace communications software for voice, messaging, customer experience and analytics, is building on last year’s focus on partner engagement and enablement, which powered the acquisition of 50,000 net-new CallSwitch One users, with the official launch of a new MSP Partner Programme.
The programme, announced in October at the North Star by Nebula partner event, is now officially live, giving the company’s 600-plus partners access to enhanced training, sales enablement and go-to-market support tailored to the needs of three partner tiers – Certified, Premium and Elite.
At the Certified level, the focus is on getting partners to market quickly by providing technical training, pre-sales support and white-label automated assets. As partners win more customers and progress to the Premium and Elite tiers, the focus becomes increasingly commercial, with structured sales training, digital performance audits, exhibition support, targeted B2B prospecting data, more marketing funds and early access to new platform capabilities.
Shortly after the programme was announced, Technology Reseller caught up with Nebula Chief Marketing Officer Simon Blackwell and Head of Product James Lockhart to find out more about Nebula’s platform and why it is such a compelling offering for MSPs. We started out by asking how the business, which has been active in the UCaaS space for around nine years in various guises, was evolving to meet the needs of its channel partners and the 200,000 users of its platform.
Technology Reseller: One of the things I have noticed in your marketing is the wording ‘from telco to techco’. What do you mean by that and why is it significant for your channel partners?
Simon Blackwell: In our space a lot of solutions are based on platforms like Asterisk and Kamailio. There’s a huge amount of open source and a huge amount of upcycling, so what you end with are patchwork solutions that all derive from the same underlying platform. That creates a lot of limitations in how you can develop your product, how you can differentiate it and how quickly and securely you can build.
We wanted to be unique in terms of owning our own IP and our own technology stack, so in 2022 we took a majority private equity investment from a Londonbased fund called Queens Park Equity. That enabled us to go out and acquire our own IP, which we did the same year. We bought a business called Yay.com that owns its own IP, its own design, its own code base which has made us the masters of our own destiny and enabled us to move from the open source solutions that we built beforehand to 100% proprietary IP. We’ve gone from a traditional telco model to a full SaaS model and that’s quite unique in this market. Before, any UK business that wanted an IP owner was probably going to be buying an American product, not a British one.
TR: How has having your own IP affected the development of your platform?
James Lockhart: Our ethos as a business, and what we mean by ‘going from telco to techco’, is to be a true SaaS house where every line of code is written by our own developers in our own offices. This allows us to pivot for our partners in ways that have given them unprecedented success, particuarly in certain niche areas. We can pivot our roadmap how we choose, when we choose and we can adapt to real world opportunities as they arise. It’s made us far more agile as a vendor.
TR: Can you give some examples of what this has enabled you to do for your partners?
James Lockhart: Two big areas for us are our ability to integrate with CRMs and vertical-specific software tools that might not be broad enough for some of the larger players to invest time and effort in – some of the American vendors that Simon referenced. What that enables our partners to do is build something that is entirely bespoke through us.
Secondly, we’re able to build features that meet specific use cases that, again, could be under-served by some of the larger global players. One area where we’ve seen impressive growth through our partners is in the managed office space. We’ve built tools that allow bridging between accounts so that they can have on-net calls, messages and presence shared between companies that are owned by the same reseller but operate as individual businesses.
TR: So, integrations are one element of the transition from telco to techco. What else is involved?
James Lockhart: There are probably three key pillars for us. The first is CX tools, or customer experience tools, that give SMEs in particular access to contact centre features that in the past they wouldn’t have been able to deploy because they were too expensive and were generally built for a broader scale of organisation.
The second pillar is integrations that allow, again, predominantly SMEs to have access to that ecosystem of SaaS tools, from CRMs to communications platform to things like single sign-on that in the past they may not have been able to do.
The third pillar, in which integrations also play a part, is vertical propositions. In the past, our industry would have talked about verticalisation, when what they really meant was industry landing pages with some of the right language to draw the customer in. That’s not enough anymore. For us, this pillar is about building the communications tools that we offer into the workflows that customers already have; it’s about understanding the compliance requirements and the user journey of the business, the pain points that they have; and it’s about building full commercial propositions as well.
The general business model that UCaaS providers have traditionally gone to market with is no longer sufficient – it doesn’t scale in the right way because people’s usage patterns are different.
TR: Simon, this is a question for you. Are there particular areas of the market that are responding to this proposition?
Simon Blackwell: Definitely. We’re predominantly a channel business, and all of our intelligent sales, if you like, our solution sales are done through channel partners. That’s why partners exist. We’re definitely seeing that some verticals are more active than others. That might in part be due to the partners who work with us, but we spend a lot of time working with industry analysts as well, which helps us sense-check the direction we’re going in and helps James validate his roadmap choices as well.
We know that healthcare is still a big play for MSPs – you don’t need an analyst to tell you that. We’re seeing a lot more specialisms around recruitment and integrations with recruitment-specific CRMs. We’re seeing the same in residential lettings and sales. We’re seeing it in managed office spaces. There are some unique industries out there that have CRMs and workflow tools that are specific just to them and owning our own code base means that we can build that stuff really, really quickly and give a partner who is active in a particular market something to differentiate themselves.
James Lockhart: The other thing is, the more industries have ecosystems of tools built purely for them, the broader the options they have, the more complex the deployments become, the greater the compliance aspects. As a result, we’re seeing pretty impressive growth in the channel space with trusted providers who supply everything from comms tools through to software through to cyber. They want to go to one provider where they can buy the whole package as a solution sale.
TR: And have the ability to adapt to new technologies like AI. How is AI impacting your product offering, and what might the roadmap be in the future?
James Lockhart: There’s no unified communications provider in our space that is not either deploying AI or working on deploying AI. That’s a given, and we’re no different. We spent quite a lot of 2025 fleshing out a proposition that we want to go to market with in 2026. As Simon said, our ethos as a true SaaS house is that we want to own as much of a product as we can. Unlike a lot of our competitors, it’s not enough for us to rely on tokens sending call data out to public models. We want to host LLMs in our own infrastructure, on our own GPUs and we want to make sure that what we provide to our partners is scalable and cost-effective. Most importantly, we really want to protect their data and the data of their customers.
AI’s a huge part of our roadmap for 2026. Obviously, as a predominantly voice provider, the bulk of what we’re doing is around voice transcription and the data that comes from those transcriptions, everything from sentiment analysis through to call summaries. Live agent assistance is going to be really important for us in 2026, all the way through to fully fledged voice agents that can handle queries and in some case actually action those queries.
TR: How are you helping your partners maximise the opportunities in your market, especially those that come from the IT side who might not be familiar with voice, but also voice resellers that might not be au fait with all the possibilities inherent in the transition from telco to techco?
Simon Blackwell: Our partner base is really mixed. Some are very familiar with voice, but others will be new to it, in some cases because it has traditionally been quite complicated. For us, it’s very much a case of Click to Deploy. James always talks about the fact that the thing partners love most about our platform is the fact you can spin up a user quickly. You can get them going quickly. You can start billing your customer quickly, which is so, so important.
Then, there’s the whole education piece. The Nebula Training Academy is something we’ve had in various guises pretty much the whole time that we’ve been around. Eight hundred people went through that Training Academy in 2025, learning about everything from how to use the portal to how to set stuff up to new features and new add-ons that they can monetise.
For example, we recently launched a whole analytics package. Unlike our competitors who have to bolt on other products to make that happen, it’s all done in-house by us, but you still need to train the partner, you still need to familiarise them with it so they have the confidence to go out and sell it. So, we have a really detailed training program on all aspects of the new analytics package. We also do compliance training to keep partners abreast of the latest Ofcom requirements because we all have skin in that game and responsibility there. That’s been well received and is a key part of our proposition.
TR: What have been some of your other highlights of the last 12 months?
James Lockhart: Obviously, we shared the same economic headwinds as the whole industry and the whole country in 2025, but it was still a pretty impressive year for us. We maintained a growth trajectory, both in terms of our revenue and our profit, and that allowed us to invest in our teams. I work with a really talented development team that has doubled in size in the last 12 months, and we managed to do that while migrating almost 100,000 users from a third-party platform to our own IP. So, 2025 was fantastic for us, and that’s testament to the growth that our partner community saw, because obviously we’re tethered to their success.
TR: And what are your plans for 2026?
Simon Blackwell: It’s going to be a very different year for us. As James mentioned, we’ve migrated the best part of 100,000 people to our stack. That is business we already had, so our focus in the last 12 months has mainly been on bringing everything into our tech stack as opposed to winning new business. Even so, we’ve put nearly 50,000 net new users onto the platform.
In the coming year we’ll be focusing on two key things. One is partner growth, bringing in new partners, and a number of new business sales people have come into the business to help us drive that. Their ability to do that is in part down to James’s team and the product roadmap they have and making sure we deliver on our commitments around new features that enable our partners to differentiate and new features that they can monetise to build their recurring revenue.
To learn more visit: www.nebulacloud.com
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