Zoom directing partners to UC and CC opportunities

Zoom is continuing to work with its channel to take advantages of opportunities in contact centres as customers modernise their comms applications.

The vendor emerged as a leading critical tool during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing millions to continue communicating with colleagues and customers during periods of lockdown and social distancing. Since then, the vendor has continued to innovate its collaboration tools and looked to work with the channel to get its tools into the hands of more users.

One person leading the channel charge is Tony McNish, EMEA channel chief at Zoom, who was recently promoted into his EMEA role and is keen to increase indirect activity across that vast region.

He also credits the appointment of Nick Tood as global channel chief back in 2022, as part of a strategy to not only go partner-first but to pit some serious investment behind that ambition.

“The narrative in this business is that channel isn’t part of the growth strategy, channel is the growth strategy. We’re only going to accelerate through channel,” said McNish. “It’s all in on how we scale through channels. What we’ve done in the past couple of years is massively accelerate that. The way that partners transact with us has completely been refreshed and revamped. [There has been a] real turnaround in terms of how we make channels central to the strategy.”

The vendor has made efforts to align partners with its opportunities, with its unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre services being two key examples.

“The product that we had has evolved into a full AI [artificial intelligence] platform, and the modalities that are in the platform have obviously evolved and transitioned throughout the life cycle as well, so as we’ve gone through those different evolutions of evolving the platform, different partner profiles have become more interested,” said McNish.

“We want to be clear to the channel that we want to be strategic together. If a partner wants to invest in a Zoom relationship, it’s important for us to get return on that investment. Meticulous business planning together, making sure that it’s clear what the partner is going to get from the partnership and ultimately what we’re going to get from it, and that we can hold each other accountable in the right way.”

McNish said that the focus for the rest of the year was to encourage partners to embrace the company’s wide portfolio and tap into the UCaaS and contact centre opportunities.

“We’re changing the conversation that they have in the direction of content that we and our partners can quantitate AI, and how our customers can gain productivity gains through using the platform,” he added.

As well as signalling to partners areas where there are chances to increase revenue, McNish said that Zoom was keen to provide the space for them to stand out and underline their own value to the customer.

“We want to give them the tools to be able to differentiate themselves – giving them those tools to be able to do that is really important,” he said.