INTERVIEW
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DialoX marketplace and offer that out to the channel.
TR: Are you attracting only traditional comms resellers with your messaging and capabilities or are partners with different backgrounds expressing an interest in Voiceworks too? GL: Clearly, we are attracting traditional comms resellers, but we’re also seeing an appetite for recurring revenue streams in many other sectors. Print is the obvious example. We’re also talking to serviced offices. I had a conversation with one a couple of weeks ago and they were saying that when a tenant that might have come to them as a startup grows and leaves because they need more space, they lose that revenue. What if we provide new tenants with a startup-in-a-box package, giving them a phone number and mobiles that they can take with them on that growth journey? That way the serviced office retains that recurring revenue even after they’ve moved on.
TR: What take-up have you had so far?
GL: With DialoX, we’re going through a big education piece and taking partners through the three stages of that marketplace journey. Those conversations are starting to have traction and in the next six months I expect to see many of our partners come to market with things they’ve built within the DialoX environment. Regarding our own AI solutions, we are leading with Shomi, an AI assistant for our Coligo UC platform, because it’s personal to everybody and is something that partners and the channel can commercialise. It’s all very good talking about AI, but how does the channel create value by offering it to their customers? We think we’ve found a way to do that. TR: What other aspects of your proposition, apart from AI, resonate with your partners? GL: The one that’s surprised me most is SIP. I’ve been to lots of meetings where we’ve been told SIP is a dying market and everyone’s going full UC. That doesn’t appear to be the case. We have a new SIP offering (SIP+) that our partners have helped us to build with their commercial and technical input. TR: In addition to your core UC platform, you have relationships with other vendors that enable partners to offer a complete solution. Please can you tell me more about your vendor partnerships. Why are they so important? GL: You could say they exist to enable our core offering. You can’t run a hosted platform without connectivity, so we’ve got partnerships with Sky and BT. We’re also working with EE on the mobile side, in part because the UK is currently massively underserved by fixed mobile convergence. Our industry hasn’t done a good job advancing FMC in the UK. In Scandinavia most sales are mobile-led and FMC-led, whereas for a long time the UK culture has been to get up, go to an office and come home from an office. Because you had that fixed environment you didn’t need a mobile one. That’s now changing, and we want to give people the ability to work anywhere they want, without losing the efficiency or control of data and inputs they’re used to.
TR: What are your priorities for the next 12 months?
GL: We need to continue to educate the market about AI and how we create additional value around SIP, and we need to enable UK businesses in that SMB space to be ready for the PSTN switch-off. If you already have that business, focus on how you lock it in because everybody’s going to be going after it. If your customers aren’t yet ready to be fully UC, look at how you can take them from SIP in their existing legacy infrastructure to fully UC over five years, rather than telling them to do it in six months, because that’s scary for them.
Irina Richardson
TR: AI was a big part of your initial proposition. Can you tell me a bit more about that and the value it brings to Voiceworks? GL: There are two parts to what we bring. The first is what I call ‘personal assistant AI’. End users want support and help with their work processes, and our Shomi AI assistant gives them that capability within their voice infrastructure. The second part is how we make processes easier and how we enable partners to take those services to their customers. To this end, we’ve launched a product called DialoX, which effectively has three elements to it: a marketplace where a partner can consume pre-configured voice and chatbots and AI applications; low-code and no-code tools that enable partners to build their own solutions; and, at some point in the near future, the ability to sell what they’ve created. If you’re a partner and you’ve got your own AI capabilities and your own AI devs, you can commercialise that within our
TR: In the meantime, is there anything else that resellers can expect from you?
GL: When we last spoke, I explained how we were going to add value with services that enable our partners to go to market, especially those that are looking to add telecoms or UC or AI for the first time. The marketing service we’ll be bringing to the channel is something that really excites me because we normally talk about tech and now we’re going to be talking about how we can help partners take that tech to market. I know the marketing team back in the office are really excited about it. I expect that to come out in Q4.
www.voiceworks.co.uk
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