Bolt-On services have become a staple of modern solutions as customers demand simplicity. As businesses’ journey into the cloud continues to grow deeper, the features and additional services they use on their platform of choice have also increased
Be it in connectivity or customer-facing communications, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a business that uses a solution that is entirely created by one vendor. In fact, the art of reselling in recent times has been to take a solution and cater to specific markets with additional functionality.
Another way to look at this though, as Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of Valoir points out, is the choice between investing in a range of solutions from one provider, or the best alternative on the market for what the business needs.
“This really gets down to the best-of-breed versus suite argument,” said Wettemann. “There are parts of the communication stack, like analytics and workforce optimization, where a core vendor may have basic capabilities but companies are willing to invest in outside vendors that offer more specific capabilities or specific value.”
The Dilemma
A great example of these types of decisions that businesses are making is around multi-cloud. While it may make sense for the sake of ease to just go with one provider, the research would say that the decision is quite a conundrum.
According to a global survey from Vanson Bourne and VMware, nearly 1-out-of-5 organisations have realised the business value of multi-cloud, although 70 per cent currently struggle with the complexity that comes with it.
At the same time, the vast majority of organisations (95%) agree that multi-cloud architectures are now critical to business success. Even more interesting is the discovery that 52% believe organisations that do not adopt a multi-cloud approach risk failure.
Yet, on the other hand, Patrick Watson, Head of Research at Cavell Group says that “businesses are definitely looking for the complete package.
“Our enterprise research shows that 66 percent prefer a single provider for communications technology. That just shows that they would generally rather not be buying the UC licence from one place and get the phones from another, they’d rather have just one supplier.”
Rationalisation
That simplification, or rationalisation as Wettemann described it, is not only appealing in the initial adoption phase but also when businesses audit the technology they use.
Despite what Microsoft would have you believe, Teams is not the only platform employees log into, however as different departments have different needs, it’s natural for the services they take advantage of to also differ.
“What we are seeing is a rationalisation in the space both as those core vendors build out their capabilities, either organically or by acquisition, and customers start to realise that maybe they bought a few too many bolt-ons and the cost of managing them is exceeding the benefit that they get from them,” said Wettemann.
“We see that in a lot of areas where a cloud solution means that one department may have bought one thing to add on without knowing what the other department is necessarily doing.
“Businesses could be executing different channel strategies for chatbots, IVRs, and self-service, where it would make sense to consolidate the solution instead of learning three different tools.”
“The benefit comes when resellers build a solution of services around a technology stack, because it becomes a challenge for businesses to move away.”
All things to all people
Technology audits have become an increasingly common practice since the turn of the decade. With everyone working from home, the scattergun approach to adopting platforms for accounting, marketing, and customer communications has added up and resulted in a smaller list of platforms.
Therefore resellers may be tempted to try to cast a wide net in order to catch as many businesses as possible, but Watson highlighted the problems with being “all things to all people.”
“To start with, resellers will likely have to re-educate their salespeople about how to sell the new services, and technical teams also need to learn how to support and integrate those things too.
“Customer base is another issue, because they won’t be used to buying these new services from one place. As a result, the job will be to convince an existing customer base to buy additional services, or find new customers.
“It seems appealing to offer everything, but the practicality of adding a lot of new services is a challenge that we see all the time.”
Route for reseller
Rather than try to please everyone, Wettemann said that businesses are looking to resellers to reduce the complexity that they deal with.
“With this trend toward rationalisation, customers are looking to resellers to help them solve problems,” said Wettemann,
“they don’t necessarily need to know or want to know what those connected pieces may be.
“If resellers can go to a customer with a specific solution that solves a problem that they understand, they can reduce the complexity for the customer, and reduce the number of management points that customer has to evaluate.
“The more they can be the single touch point, to make sure the customer gets value across the solution, the more successful their strategy is going to be.”
“Resellers can capture a huge part of the market just by reselling Microsoft and the professional managed services added on top,” said Watson.
“Where it becomes interesting is if a reseller can build a package around the Microsoft stack, for example, connectivity, mobile phone licences, and contact centre, it’s more work for the customer to migrate each service to a new provider point by point.
“The benefit comes when resellers build a solution of services around a technology stack, because it becomes a challenge for businesses to move away.”
