In the summer, Technology Reseller got together with Gareth Long to discuss Voiceworks’ first year in the UK and the unified communications and smart voice solutions provider’s plans for the next 12 months.
When we met, Gareth was itching (but unable) to talk about a new SIP proposition that he felt would make good his promise to do things differently and shake up the UK’s unified communications market.
That product, SIP+, has now been launched. Instead of the established model of making partners pay for SIP channels before a single call is made, SIP+ gives partners SIP channels for free and only charges them for the minutes their customers use.
Gareth, now UK Managing Director of Enreach Group’s indirect business (Voiceworks) and its direct business (Enconvo), says that by giving a choice of PAYG, bundled or aggregated usage options, SIP+ enables partners to build SIP around how their customers use voice rather than paying for capacity upfront.
“The channel has accepted SIP channel charges for a long time but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Partners are under pressure to protect margin and find new ways to compete, so we think it is time to ask a very simple question: why are they still paying for SIP channels?,” he said.
“SIP+ is our answer. This is not about launching another version of the same thing. We want to shake up a market that has become too comfortable with the way things are. ‘That’s how it’s always been done’ isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing it.
“SIP+ isn’t about cutting the price to cut corners. Partners still get the features, flexibility and support they need to serve their customers, but with more room to make the commercials work for their business.”
Since we spoke (and since Gareth’s promotion), Voiceworks has also strengthened its channel team with the appointment of Irina Richardson as Channel Development Manager to help resellers, MSPs, IT providers, telecoms dealers and print providers unlock new growth opportunities as the company continues to develop its AI capabilities and services wrap.
Technology Reseller (TR): It’s a year since Voiceworks entered the UK market. What sort of impact have you had?
Gareth Long (GL): A really positive one. The big surprise for us is the partners that we’re now working with in the channel. We were a new entrant – nobody had heard of Voiceworks a year ago – and the traction we’ve gained with some of the bigger partners in the UK has been exciting. It’s been a good first year.
TR: What do the partners you’re working with value most about Voiceworks?
GL: Our honesty and the fact we’ve got some disruptive launches coming (see above). We’ve taken a blank piece of paper and said: ‘We’re a partner- first business. How do we build for our partners?’. We sat down with our partners and have come up with propositions that make their life easier and, more importantly, the lives of their customers easier.
TR: Voiceworks has a good pedigree, being part of Enreach Group. Is that something partners are aware of?
GL: We’ve spent a lot of time over the last year telling people about that pedigree because when you launch a new brand there’s a risk people will think there’s no history. The reality is the company started in 2005 as a Dutch channel-only voice business, and we’ve maintained that focus ever since. We’re now in 25 countries, with 2.7 million users across the group and we own and control our own IP. That gives us the ability to react to, build and deliver what partners want and are asking for, as opposed to just being a cookie-cutter business.
TR: The UC market is obviously very competitive, with a lot of downward pressure on prices. How do you resist that?
GL: There’s always going to be downward pressure on price, whether you’re talking about UC, mobile or connectivity, and the way to resist that is to create new value. To start with, it was just the UC. Then call recording became the big thing and we were able to create new value out of that. Then it was analytics. Now AI is offering a new way to create value, which creates commercial gains for partners and for their customers.
TR: AI was a big part of your initial proposition. Can you tell me a bit more about that and the value it brings to Voiceworks?
GL: There are two parts to what we bring. The first is what I call ‘personal assistant AI’. End users want support and help with their work processes, and our Shomi AI assistant gives them that capability within their voice infrastructure.
The second part is how we make processes easier and how we enable partners to take those services to their customers. To this end, we’ve launched a product called DialoX, which effectively has three elements to it: a marketplace where a partner can consume pre-configured voice and chatbots and AI applications; low-code and no-code tools that enable partners to build their own solutions; and, at some point in the near future, the ability to sell what they’ve created. If you’re a partner and you’ve got your own AI capabilities and your own AI devs, you can commercialise that within our DialoX marketplace and offer that out to the channel.
TR: What take-up have you had so far?
GL: With DialoX, we’re going through a big education piece and taking partners through the three stages of that marketplace journey. Those conversations are starting to have traction and in the next six months I expect to see many of our partners come to market with things they’ve built within the DialoX environment.
Regarding our own AI solutions, we are leading with Shomi, an AI assistant for our Coligo UC platform, because it’s personal to everybody and is something that partners and the channel can commercialise. It’s all very good talking about AI, but how does the channel create value by offering it to their customers? We think we’ve found a way to do that.
TR: What other aspects of your proposition, apart from AI, resonate with your partners?
GL: The one that’s surprised me most is SIP. I’ve been to lots of meetings where we’ve been told SIP is a dying market and everyone’s going full UC. That doesn’t appear to be the case. We have a new SIP offering (SIP+) that our partners have helped us to build with their commercial and technical input.
TR: In addition to your core UC platform, you have relationships with other vendors that enable partners to offer a complete solution. Please can you tell me more about your vendor partnerships. Why are they so important?
GL: You could say they exist to enable our core offering. You can’t run a hosted platform without connectivity, so we’ve got partnerships with Sky and BT. We’re also working with EE on the mobile side, in part because the UK is currently massively underserved by fixed mobile convergence. Our industry hasn’t done a good job advancing FMC in the UK. In Scandinavia most sales are mobile-led and FMC-led, whereas for a long time the UK culture has been to get up, go to an office and come home from an office. Because you had that fixed environment you didn’t need a mobile one. That’s now changing, and we want to give people the ability to work anywhere they want, without losing the efficiency or control of data and inputs they’re used to.
TR: Are you attracting only traditional comms resellers with your messaging and capabilities or are partners with different backgrounds expressing an interest in Voiceworks too?
GL: Clearly, we are attracting traditional comms resellers, but we’re also seeing an appetite for recurring revenue streams in many other sectors. Print is the obvious example. We’re also talking to serviced offices. I had a conversation with one a couple of weeks ago and they were saying that when a tenant that might have come to them as a startup grows and leaves because they need more space, they lose that revenue. What if we provide new tenants with a startup-in-a-box package, giving them a phone number and mobiles that they can take with them on that growth journey? That way the serviced office retains that recurring revenue even after they’ve moved on.
TR: What are your priorities for the next 12 months?
GL: We need to continue to educate the market about AI and how we create additional value around SIP, and we need to enable UK businesses in that SMB space to be ready for the PSTN switch-off. If you already have that business, focus on how you lock it in because everybody’s going to be going after it. If your customers aren’t yet ready to be fully UC, look at how you can take them from SIP in their existing legacy infrastructure to fully UC over five years, rather than telling them to do it in six months, because that’s scary for them.
TR: In the meantime, is there anything else that resellers can expect from you?
GL: When we last spoke, I explained how we were going to add value with services that enable our partners to go to market, especially those that are looking to add telecoms or UC or AI for the first time. The marketing service we’ll be bringing to the channel is something that really excites me because we normally talk about tech and now we’re going to be talking about how we can help partners take that tech to market. I know the marketing team back in the office are really excited about it. I expect that to come out in Q4.
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