Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

In UC you can have a brilliant product but no sales if there’s no plan or path to reach the customer. In a market largely reliant on partner companies, the point of vulnerability can stem from a lack of resources for marketing at the channel level. In this podcast, Becky Kendrick, Channel and Partner Enablement Marketing Director at Ribbon Communications, outlines how Ribbon counters this challenge by offering its partner community an easy to access, easy to use and easy to implement portal that has the content and media the partners need, practically in a ready-to-go, ready to deploy state. Kendrick outlines how Ribbon generates content and then purposes it for the partners to customize, grab and go. Kendrick offers use cases and outlines her promotional recommendations. “It’s all about time and resources,” says Kendrick, noting that by offering ready-made content, the partners can conduct successful campaigns without having to tie up resources. She notes that Ribbon can take partners by the hand to make it all happen.

Visit www.rbbn.com

As 5G continues to emerge as the way mobility carriers deliver services, personal devices will continue to make their journey deeper into the core communication regime of the enterprise. In this podcast we learn about number masking. According to Telestax, “Number Masking is the ability to ensure customers and businesses can make phone calls and send messages without exposing personal phone numbers.” Kevin Nethercott, Chief Commercial Officer and Veena Vadgama, Vice President Marketing of Telestax, discuss the number masking story and opportunity. We learn how the pandemic has impacted how organizations use CPaaS applications and the many ways number masking has become important to more organizations as so many firms have associates using their own devices to communicate with the outside world. We learn how number masking is critical to service providers and we get an understanding of how Telestax is working to enable their partners to explain and sell the service.

Visit www.telestax.com

The pandemic crises have moved companies to a distributed model, but are new circumstances masking old processes? In this podcast, Tom Martin, CEO of Glance discusses how end users and partners can move beyond replace and fix, to transformation. Glance has made inroads in the difficult to pierce financial sector. Martin points out that digital transformation and AI, not only are upending the way companies organize their real time communications, in terms of platform and process, but that they have the potential to create whole new ways to do business with their respective customer bases. Where once people called a stockbroker’s office to place an order that would later be confirmed by a paper, mobile apps enabling customers to buy and sell investments with a swipe of a finger, is an example of product and brand differentiating innovation. Martin thinks opportunities exist in helping companies create unique, brand defining experiences. Martin discusses how Glance has brought change to household name companies, while being mindful of those company’s complex security needs. We learn how structured collaboration and video conferences can become more than an alternative way to meet.

Tom Martin

Visit https://ww2.glance.net/

2020 has proven a trying time for businesses as they faced the challenges to maintain communications with employees, customers, and vendors. This was especially true if advance business continuity planning had not been done nor a cloud-based solution been adopted. While this was a challenge for many, some companies were in a position to provide support and to shine.  How has the new Work From Home (WFH) environment impacted VoIP/UCaaS providers? What new challenges have been faced? Has this been proven out to be the new business communications standard? In this podcast, Ben Humphreys, CEO and founder of Simplicity VoIP, shares his experiences in the rapidly changing UCaaS space, including opportunities presented by the new Work From Home (WFH) environment for VoIP/UCaaS providers. Humphreys brings with him over 30 years of experience in the UC and UCaaS industry.

Visit www.simplicityvoip.net for more information.

D&H Distributing, the major provider of SMB and consumer technologies to the North American high-tech channel, has launched a major enhancement to its Cloud Marketplace transactional platform, where partners can provision managed services through an intuitive, self-service portal. The company has added sought-after cloud solutions from industry leader Cisco, which will allow partners to bundle Cisco’s managed services solutions with hardware, software, and services, utilizing a tiered pricing structure to accommodate varied budgets for their clientele. This makes it easier for partners to create comprehensive, secure, and customized packages for a range of end-customers in different verticals, including healthcare, education, and other prominent markets. The comprehensive D&H Cloud Marketplace allows partners to purchase, provision, and invoice an extensive selection of cloud-based services through a single, intuitive interface.

This includes Cisco’s Webex collaboration platform, its Umbrella layered security solutions, and its Stealthwatch cloud-based network visibility and threat detection solutions. D&H’s experts can help partners create customized bundles based on these foundation solutions including a collaborative bundle, a remote worker bundle, and security-based packages. Listen to Jason Bystrak, vice president of D&H’s Cloud Business Unit, talk about the benefits of this new development. You’ll learn about D&H’s efforts to help more partners transition to the MSP model by way of the distributor’s Success to Cloud Path and Monetize the Seat initiatives.

Visit www.dandh.com/cloudsolutions or www.dandh.com/cisco for additional information.

Positive Technologies – a global cyber security company that helps network operators drive business performance while protecting their customers and services by providing greater visibility into infrastructure vulnerabilities, securing customer services, and protecting emerging telecoms technologies such as 5G and IoT – recently released a new research report that outlines security flaws in LTE and 5G networks. The vulnerabilities, which lie in the communications protocol called GTP – used to transmit user data and control traffic on 2G, 3G, and 4G networks – could enable cybercriminals to leave an entire city without communications, impersonate users, and get free mobile service at the expense of an operator or customer. In this podcast, Jimmy Jones, Telecoms Cybersecurity Expert discusses the findings, based on security assessments wherein Positive Technologies experts simulated the actions of would-be hackers to find vulnerabilities and help mobile operators secure networks. Among them, 83% of simulated attacks that would cause network equipment to go out of service were successful; 68% of attempted fraud attacks were successful; and 73% of attacks that would let criminals use free mobile services were possible.

Jimmy Jones

Visit https://positive-tech.com/

Exertis, a leading route-to-market and supply chain partner for global technology brands across consumer, business and enterprise, recently announced a consolidation of its services businesses to provide an end-to-end integrated portfolio covering the whole technology lifecycle. The range of services encompass six key areas: consultation, deployment, maintenance, management assistance and education and recovery (refurbishment and recycling). In this podcast Rod McCarthy, Managing Director of Exertis Services, discusses in detail how Exertis cares for customers throughout the product cycle and provides support at each stage. “Our aim is to fully support and equip resellers to confidently deliver a range of technical support services without the need for specialist expertise or expensive infrastructure investment. Our services portfolio can be provided on a “white label” basis as complete or modular solutions, depending on partner needs. Our mission is to help the channel to create new recurring annuity revenues and GP as well as enabling continuous engagement with end-users,” said Rod McCarthy.

Rod McCarthy

Visit www.exertis.com

As much of the world moved into quarantine, many organizations crashed into remote working, without long term planning and thought on how it would all work out. With the initial scramble phase of the crises over, it’s time to work at things that might have been overlooked, such as call quality and experience in the contact center. In this podcast Ian McCarthy, Director for Virsae UK and EMEA makes the case for a subscription, as a service, approach to the issue and then discusses the challenges contact centers face. Customer experience and user experience (managers don’t want to lose their best people due to frustration), and compliance and capacity planning are among the challenges. In this podcast we learn about the tectonic shifts that have occurred, such as local government organizations tripling call volumes from 15,000 to 45,000 calls per day.

Visit www.virsae.com to learn more about the Remote Worker Assessment service.

According to Chris Conry, CIO of Fuze, security is a concern for the whole enterprise, not only for the security manager or IT department. In this podcast, we learn that security as a team sport requires “four pillars”, including transparency, honesty and accountability to earn and maintain trust. Conry outlines how these measures can improve the culture of security and can help partners and their enterprise customers use a wholistic approach to the security challenge. Conry outlines his company’s experiences with real-world use cases with this approach and why it matters. During the crises, the spike in demand for video conferencing solutions, has caused both IT and business users to look more closely at security vulnerabilities.

Visit www.fuze.com

Sytel is a software house that specializes in adaptable, customizable and scalable software for the contact center. In this podcast we learn that Sytel can be used in cloud or non-cloud platforms. Patrick Bosworth, Pre-Sales Manager at Sytel gives us an overview of Sytel and the latest innovations in software for contact centers. We learn about Sytel’s problem solving approach to product development and how Sytel’s signature offerings are themselves designed to answer problems with easy to customize solutions.

Visit www.sytel.com