Intermedia news
Intermedia Reveals New Research on How Channel Partners Can Best Aid SMBs in their UCaaS Transition
SMBs represent a massive market, employing nearly half of the U.S. working population. And despite what you might think, the needs of this group are growing increasingly complex and mature.
That’s why we partnered with Techaisle, a leading global SMB IT market research organization, to evaluate the factors that are top of mind among companies in the 10-99 employee range so partners can better address their UCaaS needs.
Despite traditional notions of what small businesses looks like, today’s SMBs share many similar traits with their larger counterparts. For example, the average number of office locations among SMBs surveyed was 2.4, and the vast majority of respondents (91%) had mobile employees.
Lack of full-time IT support increases need for reliable UCaaS tools
As a result, UC adoption is on the rise, helping to support this business growth. More specifically, 40% of SMBs are adopting some form of collaboration solution, up from 32% two years ago. However, fewer than half (44%) of respondents had full-time, internal, dedicated IT personnel on staff.
Without full-time IT, SMBs need reliable, secure and robust, yet cost-effective, communication and collaboration tools; ones that are easy to deploy, manage, scale and support. Further, they rank reliability as the most important purchase decision factor. That’s where solution providers come in, as they can serve as trusted advisors, managing their IT needs remotely.
How partners can best aid SMBs in their UCaaS transition
As SMBs continue to grow in remote workers with more offices, they are looking to move their IT and telecom solutions to the cloud for the added flexibility and mobility that it provides. Paired with the knowledge that most SMBs lack full-time internal IT support, it is imperative that partners recognize this need and offer solutions that best fit their customers’ migration journey.
No matter the size of the organization, businesses need tools that help them be more agile, flexible, and mobile. So what communication and collaboration solutions are most commonly used by SMBs today? In addition to voice communications, a cornerstone of workplace productivity, make sure you are offering your customers reliable productivity software, file/document management and sharing, web conferencing, video conferencing, and Instant messaging tools.
Our SVP of Product Management, Irina Shamkova elaborates on what partners will need to be able to take full advantage of what Frost & Sullivan projects to be a $15 billion market opportunity:
Separate cloud solutions can be disjointed and hard to manage, resulting in frustration for all involved. That is why we recently launched Intermedia Unite™, an easy-to-use UCaaS platform designed to deliver a seamless experience for SMBs and the partners that serve them. Intermedia Unite builds on our 20-year proven track record of delivering against a 99.999% uptime service level agreement, with tools like VoIP Scout™ to help partners ensure call quality before the company even purchases the service. With this new offering and Intermedia’s channel-first approach, partners are well-positioned to serve as trusted advisors to SMBs in need of an affordable, robust, and incredibly reliable UCaaS solution.
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Survey methodology
The survey was commissioned by Intermedia and delivered by Techaisle, a global SMB IT Market Research and industry analyst organization. A total of 270 U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses, comprised of IT and business decision-makers at companies ranging in size from 10-99 employees, completed the survey conducted in November 2017. Results derived from a 21-minute online questionnaire and sampling quota was fixed by employee size categories.
Intermedia Unite and VoIP Scout are trademarks of Intermedia.net, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
