Healthy platform partnerships are vital for service provider success
It’s common knowledge that the key to any successful marriage is having the right partners working together in a healthy, symbiotic relationship.
In the cloud communications and collaboration market, the competition is fierce and service providers are looking to stand out from their rivals by differentiating on:
- Price
- Functionality
- Service performance
- Customer service
- Footprint and more
By partnering with a tech vendor with the best platform, a service provider can become a market leader. However, more than having great technology and a solid roadmap for the future is important. The right partner for a successful service provider must also prioritize the relationship and the service provider’s growth and profitability.
Five key considerations
When picking a tech partner, service providers have at least five key considerations:
1. DIY or purchase it
Service providers may want to design and build their own (do-it-yourself) solutions using proprietary technology or licensing third-party software. Or, another option is to resell a third-party cloud service. Whatever method is pursued, these are aspects to weigh:
- Brand equity
- Costs
- Customer ownership
- Flexibility
- Pricing
- Solution packaging
“Consolidation in the third-party North American platform vendor space has limited the options available to service providers choosing to build their own solutions on top of third-party platforms.”
Frost & Sullivan, May 2021
2. Seats vs. Sessions Pricing
In the DIY solution, options include licensing tech by the seat or sessions (based on concurrent call paths or active sessions).
The second option of “active sessions” pricing will provide service providers with significant profit margin and flexibility benefits because it allows for oversubscription and custom-tailored pricing for different types of endpoints. (This is the NetSapiens approach).
3. Attributes and future vision
The platform selected must currently include the following attributes:
- Rich feature set
- Reliability
- Security
- Scalability
- Compliance
- Speedy innovation
- APIs and easy integration
For the future, the right solution should have a roadmap that includes platform programmability and communications capabilities that can easily integrate with prominent business and industry-specific tools.
4. Collaboration
Service providers shopping for the best vendors to meet their needs often have to choose between two sizes. There are large, impersonal vendors that are servicing many other providers with the exact same solution. And then there are smaller platform partners like NetSapiens that are nimbler, more supportive, and happy to collaborate closely with each provider to tailor solutions that meet their specific needs.
5. Stamina
Is this tech developer and potential partner in it for the long run? Good question that every service provider needs to ask before getting hitched with a vendor.
When evaluating a potential platform partner, service providers must take note of the partner’s profitability, growth rates, and market share evolution. Ignoring red flags could be very costly to service providers down the road.
“NetSapiens is the fourth largest third-party UCaaS vendor with the fastest growing platform in the North American market.”
Frost & Sullivan, May 2021
More advice for platform partner seekers
In a recently published “visual white paper” filled with numerous survey results, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan wrote: “To build brand equity and maintain customer ownership, providers must have the option to private-label or co-brand the cloud solutions they deliver to businesses.”
Get your complimentary copy of the Frost & Sullivan report
The Frost & Sullivan visual white paper titled Enabling Disruption Through Innovative Business Models and Advanced Cloud Collaboration Solutions is available for download now.
You will learn
- What APIs businesses plan to use in the near future
- Top 10 types of criteria that are used to choose a cloud comms provider
- What 68% of UCaaS buyers say is crucial to their purchase decision
- Cloud strategies that are key to digital transformation
- Cloud migration plans for businesses within the next two years
- How to choose platform partners that unlock value on all levels
Check out our previous Frost & Sullivan Report blog: Integrating Siloed Services with Cloud Collaboration Suites
