Written by mojotech | Dec 23, 2016 5:00:00 AM
According to Zane Long, RingCentral's Vice President of Channel Sales, customers are now driving demand for cloud and cloud communications. "Increasingly, I hear customers say that going forward they will be “cloud first” and “cloud only” when it comes to all things IT " says Long. Long believes that this is one of four forces that will shape UCaaS demand in 2017. In this podcast, Long discusses the bubble-up effect, the impact on the channel of discovering opportunities as they better understand the platform, the end of hybrid IT models, and what Long describes as "enablement is king." "The proof is in the platform," says Long, pointing out that as channels discover the rich set of services that can be sold as they jump out of the software model, their commitment to sell cloud is reinforced. Long sees the sunset of the channel model of selling hybrid traditional on-premise hardware with cloud-based infrastructure and capabilities. Finally, Long sees more channel enablement. "Vendors need to “think partner enablement first,” making it easy to transact to keep their partners transacting and gaining market share for their solutions. " Long discusses how these trends will shape 2017 into a year of both growth and change in UCaaS. http://media.blubrry.com/telecomresellerpodcast/content.blubrry.com/telecomresellerpodcast/RingCentral_12-20-2016.mp3