Jive Adds BC, Discusses Searchable Voice

In April Jive formally unveiled a new business continuity solution. And in a sign of what’s to come from the hosted voice provider, the company also has been talking about searchable voice and contextual communications. Jive Business Continuity provides a failover capability that preserves users’ most essential phone functions during an internet disruption or outage. This a server-based application enables businesses to reach staff and emergency services even when their connection is down. In a recent interview with INTERNET TELEPHONY CMO Matt Peterson

also talked about how voice is the richest vein of communications, and how it could be even more valuable with context and the ability to easily search voice communications.

Peak 10 Reiterates Its Commitment to the Channel

The national provider of cloud and colocation services gets about 40 percent of its revenue and more than half of its new customers via channel. And Dave Sroka, vice president of channel sales, said Peak 10 wants to increase the amount of business it does with the channel as a whole. “The channel is just a smarter way to work to the end customer,” he said. Peak 10 has a channel-neutral philosophy with respect to its direct sales team. That means Peak 10 sales people make the same commissions whether they are selling direct or working with channel partners. That way internal sales people do not have a disincentive to work with channel partners.

ADTRAN (News - Alert) Expands ProCloud

This telecom supplier wants to make clear that it’s moving to the cloud. In yet another sign of that strategic direction, the company has unveiled its ProCloud Subscription Services Suite. This suite brings under one umbrella ADRAN’s existing ProCloud Network Management solution; ProCloud Analytics, which it delivers in partnership with Purple; ProCloud Security, for which TitanHQ is a partner; and ProCloud Unified Communication, which is powered by BroadSoft (News - Alert). These ProCloud solutions are being brought to market exclusively through ADRAN’s managed service provider and value-added reseller partners.

Aerohive Offering Addresses MSPs 

Enterprise W-Fi company Aerohive has introduced a new MSP offering that provides its authorized channel partners the ability to deliver managed Wi-Fi services. With no up-front investment, partners in North America can also resell turnkey managed services offered by SYNNEX, Aerohive’s exclusive U.S. distribution partner for managed services.

Channel Can Build on Dizzion Virtual Desktop

Dizzion offers virtual desktop services for which it says channel partners can enjoy healthy margins. And the services, it says, create opportunities for channel partners to bring along a variety of complementary offerings like application delivery, secure endpoints, and storage. The six-year-old company, whose heritage is in the cloud and colo space, works with agents, master agents, resellers, and subagents. It has relationships with channel partners including Avail Partners, Carrier Sales, Involta, ViaWest, and many others. Seventy percent of Dizzion’s business is driven through the channel. And the Denver-based company and its channel partners target the BPO, finance, health care, and insurance verticals, and Dizzion has the HIPPA and PCI compliance to enable them to do that.

Call Center Outfit Talkdesk Seeks Channel Partners

Talkdesk is working to scale up its channel effort. It’s spent the last year building a partner portal and training curriculum, and getting contracts in place, and now it’s in the midst of recruiting channel partners. The five-year-old company offers a call center support voice and SMS communications, and enabling mobile interactions via a mobile SDK. And its automation framework allows Talkdesk to work out of the box with 25 tools from such companies as Salesforce and Zendesk.

CenturyLink Tiers Channel Program

About a year ago John DeLozier came aboard CenturyLink as vice president of channel alliances. Upon joining, DeLozier got to work building a channel team and adding a medals program to its channel initiative. In the past, CenturyLink had treated all its channel partners the same, whether they sold very little or a whole lot, explained DeLozier. That meant all channel partners’ orders were processed the same, they all received the same awards, and they were all valued at the same level. “We needed to fix that,” said DeLozier, “and we have.” The Ascend Medals Award Program that CenturyLink introduced earlier this year allowed it – based on the historical and current sales performance of its channel partners – to rank them in Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories. The other large telecom service providers don't have tiered channel programs today, he said.

BabyTEL Says T.38 Works

Vice President of Channel Partnership Dan Dorsey says T.38 has been a problematic technology, but he adds that babyTEL has mastered it and can cure people’s T.38 ills. He added that babyTEL is also one of the few companies that can encrypt T.38. That’s important for organizations with HIPPA compliance requirements. The company is also working on business continuity architectures that are far advanced to what is available today, he said. And going forward, the company expects to introduce some advanced communications services integrated into a cloud PBX, he added.

Nitel Picks Versa for SD-WAN

Nationwide managed telecom service provider Nitel is leveraging Versa Networks technology to provide SD-WAN and SD-Security services to its channel partners and corporate customers. Nitel is offering its channel partners access to free on-demand and live training related to SD-WAN.

3CX Introduces Cloud PBX Creation Wizard

Unified communications solutions provider 3CX has come out with a web-based wizard that companies and resellers can use to create a complete cloud PBX system in a cloud of their choice. This capability is called PBX Express, and it allows users to employ the SIP trunks and devices (including softphone and smartphone clients for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android) of their choice.

ALE Names Simpson VP Channel Head

Lisa Simpson has been tapped by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s ALE to serve as vice president of channel sales and distribution strategy in North America. She will work to expand the company’s North American reseller and distributor base, and develop new opportunities to support partners in such vertical markets as education and transport. A 20-year veteran of the IT and telecom industries, Simpson most recently worked as senior director of partner sales at Nokia.

Video Surveillance Offers Resellers More Upside

SkySwitch has introduced its Video Surveillance as a Service offering, which it is bringing to small and medium business customers through its network of resellers. “At SkySwitch, we recognized that the deployment model and target market of VSaaS is almost identical to UCaaS,” said Jayson Jones, vice president of business development of SkySwitch. “IP-enabled cameras are deployed on the customer premise[s] and managed from the cloud in much the same way as SIP phones. This similarity will enable UCaaS resellers to leverage their existing sales, service, and support infrastructure to capture a new revenue stream.” Ordering, provisioning, and customer account management can all be handled without resellers having to learn an entirely new system. This new solution can be managed from within the SkySwitch Reseller Dashboard.

Pax8 Adds VP Service Operations

Cloud distributor Pax8 has created the position of vice president of service operations and hired John Walters to fill that spot as part of its effort to streamline operations. Prior to joining Pax8, Walters was a senior director for Wipro (News - Alert), a global IT, consulting, and business process services company. Walters will report to company COO Klaus Dimmler. Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of partner solutions, commented: “The addition of John and the new processes we have put into place will help us further enable our partners to gain new leads, add monthly recurring revenue, and ensure they are getting the highest level of support. As the technology market continues to move closer to a cloud-first focus, we are committed to remaining agile so that we can effectively meet the needs of our partner community.”

Netsapiens: We’ll Free You from the Box

There are different ways of providing business customers with unified communications experiences. And Netsapiens has been promoting that message lately to agents who may be ready to segue from selling white-label solutions to becoming service providers themselves. Netsapiens can provide them with the unified communications platform-as-a-service to enable that transition, said Dave George, senior vice president and general manager at the 15-year-old company. That way, he added, these entities will not be at the mercy of a box.

West UC Unveils WE-Com

West UC this spring introduced an offering called WE-Com through which it creates customized transactional websites for its channel partners who serve small and medium business end users. The company provides design expertise and technical support to channel partners, which select the colors, fonts, and logos they want to leverage online. West UC collected a nominal setup fee for this service, but partners can easily earn that back if they reach very reasonable sales goals, says Shelby Cooper (News - Alert), vice president of wholesale sales and support at the company. In other recent news from West UC, the company is now offering Cisco Cloud Audio for collaboration and earlier this year launched HD Dolby spacial audio solutions.

New Program Addresses Summit Partners

ShoreTel in March announced a new partner program for businesses and developers that build voice and SMS applications on the ShoreTel (News - Alert) Summit platform. This program offers certification training, co-marketing, and development support. As part of the program, ShoreTel is also promoting its online TechConnect Marketplace, which it says helps program participants to increase their visibility to ShoreTel’s existing customer base.

TelePacific Rebrands to TPx

The national managed services carrier formerly known as TelePacific has changed its named to TPx Communications. “When we acquired DSCI last year as part of our ongoing evolution in response to our customers’ needs for integrated managed services it was pretty clear that neither ‘Tele’ nor ‘Pacific’ fit the company we are today,” said TPx CEO Dick Jalkut. 

Partners Try Out Team-One

More than 100 channel partners, serving millions of business customers across the world, were in trials with BroadSoft Team-One as of mid April, the company revealed. Team-One is a team collaboration and personal productivity solution that enables people to use a single interface through which to manage their files, messages, notes, and tasks, and to use click-to-call capability and do screen sharing, and videoconferencing. It also integrates with popular business apps.

Alliance Channel Options Grow with Irrigation

AT&T Alliance Channel is adding the AT&T Smart Cities – Irrigation solution to its portfolio. The system uses IoT controllers to track water flow and usage in near real time.