After just a year in the CEO chair, Joel Chimoindes is shaking up Nuvias UC.
As the days begin to get longer, the temperature begins to grow and, most importantly, the cricket season begins,
I’m sure I’m not the only one to say “How is it May already?”
Yet here we are, comfortably a quarter of the way through the year, wondering where the time has gone and what position we’ll be in by the end of it.
One man who knows all too well how quickly the year can roll around is the CEO of Nuvias UC, Joel Chimoindes, who celebrated a year in the job by inviting partners to the Park Plaza Hotel in London. The event was split into a morning session in which representatives from key partners opened up to the audience about the direction of the market, plans for the future, and whether they like Marmite before a handful of break-out sessions focussing on key topics like the PSTN Switch off, Customer Experience and Contact Centre to name a few.
While the market continues to throw up trends for businesses to deal with, within Nuvias UC, Chimoindes said that a lot has changed in a year too.
“Internally, we came in and put a new executive team in place, including a new
CFO, a new CCO, and a new COO, to help us shape the business as we wanted it to be,” said Chimoindes.
“We’ve made some operational changes, which have given us a great platform to add additional automation and digitalisation to our business. This really takes cost out of the more systemic parts of the business for both us and our partners.”
With a restructuring out of the way, Chimoindes was clear to make the announcement that the distributor will be focussing on four key areas within Converged Communications, each with their own team to give partners all they need to succeed in this challenging market.
“The most significant change we’ve made is how we believe that we’re going deeper with specialisation and our business.
“Those four areas that make up converged communications are UCaaS, CCaaS, telephony, and what we call spaces, all of which are underpinned with services. We’ve reorganised our business into these specialist business units that will focus on those key areas.
“Inside those key areas, we have vendor management, pre-sales, BDM, marketing support, and alignment around the back office. All that’s been underpinned by our services business as well, which is obviously services just through the channel.
“What does this mean for our partners, it means that we can provide them a much deeper level of specialisation to enhance their business, especially when they’re starting to look at new solutions and new opportunities. We’ve got a great technical team and business development managers that can stand alongside partners to help.”
Specialist Subject
The decision to create departments within the distributor has come about in order to provide resellers with the ability to offer any solution as everyone gets to grips with a converging market.
Each department within it will have a structured sales team with department-specific expertise for resellers to grow with and utilise as they grow.
In addition to this service, Chimoindes committed to “selectively expanding our vendor portfolio” to the resellers in the room, adding, “Our strategy and Nuvias UC is not to offer loads of competing vendors; we want to add complementary vendors to our solution portfolio.
“We want deep relationships with our partners; that’s a mark of success for us, and the more time we can spend with our partners, the more opportunities we can generate together.”
To the layman, offering solutions from both Microsoft and Zoom may appear to contradict its policy of not including vendors that compete against each other. However, according to the Nuvias UC CEO, both solutions have carved out their own niches within the UC&C industry.
“If you’d asked me that question 12 or 18 months ago, I might say that, because of where they both were in their lifecycles, there was a lot more competition in terms of what they did.
“But now, Zoom sits alongside Teams in many ways. Many organisations are using Teams for their chat and file management, for example, but they’re also using Zoom for telephony and CX experience.
“I don’t think these are competing as overall platforms, they’ve now got their own spaces to sit in and exist in. Of course, the meeting side of things is a competitive landscape, but the platform of choice for an end user will dictate what meeting room solutions they have, if they’ve already got a Zoom environment integrated into their workflow, they’re probably not going to go and swap all of that out to put Teams in, and vice versa.
“I think that’s the difference. Now, if it comes down to a straight shootout with an end user about whether they are going to put in an NTR or a Zoom Room, that will come down to personal preference.”
The More Things Change
While the competitive forces of Teams and Zoom may have found a way to coexist, the next battleground to fight on has emerged, called Artificial Intelligence.
Chimoindes much more graciously referred to these battlegrounds as “inflection points” but went on to say that AI should not be the topic of conversation when we talk about… well, AI.
“I heard an analyst say IoT and the metaverse were potentially two inflexion points that perhaps didn’t quite happen,” said Chimoindes. “They’ve been steady in what they’ve delivered, but they were expected to be a little bit bigger than what they’ve delivered. They haven’t been an inflection point.
“Undoubtedly AI is an inflection point, and we’re just at the start of what that can do. I mentioned in my keynote that 12 months ago, when I stood there and talked about what AI was going to do in the future, around collaboration and CX solutions; twelve months on, we’re there.
“What’s interesting is that we’re talking about the technology. Actually, what we should be talking about is productivity, because that’s what AI should be driving for people. So we’re helping the channel understand how they can help their end users be more productive with AI. I think that’s the inflection point, and it’s the opportunity as well.”
The More They Stay The Same
The inflection point of Artificial Intelligence is certainly one that Chimoindes is looking to capitalise on.
These inflection points keep coming, bringing with them opportunities for the channel to reach out to businesses and create value for the vendor partners at the heart of the new Nuvias UC structure.
Vendors have woken up to the value of channel resellers. A prime example is Zoom’s emphasis on building a partner ecosystem over the last couple of years as it looks to grow at scale.
“I think if you look at startup companies, they go through that lifecycle of growing by selling direct because that’s the natural model,” said Chimoindes. “But then they reach a maturity point where they know they need to scale, which is where the channel comes in and should become an extension of the vendors’ own capability.
“I’m by no means calling Zoom a start up, but it becomes quite expensive for a vendor to grow by selling direct. If you treat the channel in the right way, help the channel make margin, help them create opportunities, and help them be different from their competitors. That’s how vendors truly scale as well.”
Shifting the Narrative
Along with the resellers, Chimoindes said that distribution provides value to the vendors they serve, adding that the practice will never go away.
“The story of distribution is such an interesting one because whenever there’s been an inflexion point around the market and technology, everyone predicts the end of distribution. Thankfully, that’s not happened, and I don’t think it will happen because distribution will always evolve to deliver value to the channel.
“Value comes in many different ways. It could be great expertise in logistics or standing alongside a reseller to help them with opportunities, connecting partners to vendors, or helping partners generate end-user opportunities. So value comes in many different forms of distribution.
“Every successful distributor today is successful because they deliver value in a way that is suitable for them and their partners. I think distribution will always evolve alongside the channel, which is why it is here to stay.”
Building Trust
Although he may not be around longer than distribution, Chimoindes himself spoke about his ambitions for his time in the big chair at Nuvias US.
While only a year in the job, it’s clear to see that the CEO had a plan and has largely executed it within a relatively small time frame, an impressive feat in a business that generated over £100 million in revenues in the last financial year.
According to Chimoindes, above all else, a sense of trust within the team spurs such success, which he says he’d like to be remembered for.
“The organisation and people are everything,” said Chimoindes, “I think that the development of people is hugely important, and giving people opportunities to grow and develop as individuals is hugely important.
“When you’re looking at how to change culture, the number one thing you have to have in any organisation or any team is trust. So we’ve built a trusting environment that ensures people can speak without fear of consequences, making sure that we’ve got an organisation where people trust each other and understand each other as well.
“If we can foster a culture inside Nuvias UC, that gives everyone the ability to be the best version of themselves, whatever that is, and how they want to grow and develop would make me pleased.”
