By Louis Hayner, Chief Sales Officer, Alteva
In its 2010 Cloud Computing Predictions, Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Businesses are slowly but surely realizing that the benefits to the customer of cloud-based, or hosted, technologies are unsurpassed.
For example, hosted technology offers scalability in either direction, which is an especially desirable benefit in the current economic climate. With a highly-flexible technology like hosted Unified Communications (UC), companies get the peace of mind that comes with a UC solution that is not costly and complicated to scale up to meet an increase in demand or down when resources are cut.
Louis Hayner
The best part is that it is a true win-win situation; the customer saves more money and the commissions are richer for the sales agent. With hosted VoIP and UC technologies, resellers receive recurring higher commissions for every deal they close for the lifetime of the customer relationship. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.
Hosted technologies also mean less need for on-site IT resources, which further enables companies to save money. With hosted UC, there’s no costly hardware to upgrade. Because companies’ service is in the cloud, upgrades are provided automatically in the background. The service provider simply notifies customers that new capabilities are available as they are implemented.
Some other benefits unique to cloud-based UC and VoIP technologies include extensive features, disaster recovery capabilities, carrier-level call control and consolidated billing.
When selling UC solutions from the cloud, resellers can sell the components a la carte today, and add other components when the company is ready to do so. This enables customers to buy what they need today and to be reassured that the applications will integrated when they are ready to use them. Because these components are integrated in the cloud, there is an added level of stickiness and brand loyalty that means the customer will certainly come back to you when they are ready to add those other services.
Selling UC solutions also reduces the burden on the resellers technical staff. The technical expertise is generally centralized at the hosted provider with fewer technical resources required in the field. Less expertise in the field translates to smaller staff, fewer trucks and less training.
Since less equipment is placed in the field, service inventories for the reseller are primarily phones. Less inventory equates to less tied up capital and smaller warehouses.