Collaboration is quickly emerging as one of the most essential components in any communication stack Businesses are embracing collaboration tools as they look for gains in productivity, respond to changes to employment law, and explore methods for dealing with remote and dispersed teams.
Clearly, collaboration is being driven by numerous factors and shows no signs of slowing down, indeed adoption is only likely to increase as next generation collaboration comes into play.
Gather, a Channel-centric collaboration service, launched to a closed user group in the UK in April of this year. After 6 months of rigorous field-testing Gather is now ready for general release. The solution is designed for channel partners. It places the needs of the channels front and centre, alongside the demands of the end-user.
Founder of Gather, Scott Goodwin, wanted to give resellers an opportunity to build a collaboration platform that suited the needs of their end-users, complete with options to brand the experience with unique corporate guidelines, greetings, and graphics. More importantly, Gather aims to provide a free-of-charge class-leading service to end users, with a unique premium upgrade path for those who need more advanced tools.
Gather offers an integrated solution for planning, executing, recording, and filing meeting sessions to suit the needs of today’s businesses. Gather supports multi-party Video, Voice, file-share, white-boarding as well as a range of AI-led services. Gather uses a customised version of iotum’s Callbridge software as a CPaaS, which allows a high degree of flexibility and feature parity with other well-known services. I spoke to the founder of Gather, Scott Goodwin, to find out more.
‘Channel Ready’ Freemium Video Collaboration
Prior to creating Gather, Scott Goodwin founded Voxclever in 2009. Voxclever was a BroadSoft based VoIP Service Provider business, which eventually sold to PCCW Global in 2015. Scott has a lot of experience supporting the channel with UC services.
“It’s a challenging time for service providers, UC is a highly competitive market with significant price pressure [commoditisation] and increasing costs of acquisition”
“Service providers are having to compete with well-funded technology brands and their choices are becoming increasingly narrow as vendors in the space consolidate. The tech giants have deep pockets, I’m not talking just about Cisco ,but Zoom, 8×8 and RingCentral. They are all becomingly increasing visible in-front of the end user and channel partners are in danger of being disintermediated. They have to rethink UC to create value in a market where they are competing with some of the largest companies in the world. ”
Scott also drew attention to the rise of Google and Microsoft, brands that he believes to be “forcing an agenda of the consumerisation of IT services.” According to Goodwin: “These platforms allow their customers to consume their service at the point of demand for free. They do this as it builds trust instantly with the user and to access the subsequent customer activity data, to access their customers contact network and lead them down a low-cost digital sales and marketing path. These modern customer acquisition programs are the way forward and optimises sales resources. Until now the freemium service was the preserve of big tech, Gather makes it available to everyone.”
The Gather offering is a class leading white label collaboration platform. Not only supporting freemium but also highly valued premium features like AI transcription, advanced analytics and live streaming. Which enable service providers to target customers with distinct vertical offers providing high value and great margins.
The Defend, Nurture, Grow Strategy
When channel partners and resellers are exploring new technology for their portfolio, one of their biggest concerns is often how easy it is to bring that technology into the environment. Gather is a purely white-labelled proposition that’s easy to set up and implement. It was designed from the ground up to allow resellers to access the collaboration capabilities, to build unique packages and target their end-users with a relevant offer.
Gather supports video collaboration and conferencing abilities under the brand of the service provider that in turn makes it easy for the service provider to defend themselves against other competitors. Cavell’s Head of Research, Dom Black, recently stated that the UK hosted PBX market had now reached 4.3 million seats. Yet it’s estimated that less than 5% of hosted PBX deployments have collaboration capabilities. For all the great strides the reseller community have made in moving voice customers to cloud, collaboration remains an untapped opportunity. These customer bases are now being targeted by platform players offering their native collaboration services as a reason to change provider.
“Our freemium model enables service providers to give all their customers and prospects a powerful collaboration capability and defend these customers from approach. We also help resellers to explore how they can use the data about how people use these collaboration tools to help them offer deeper functionality and create more sales downstream. It is time to use UC as a driver for customer engagement, nurturing, loyalty, and growth beyond offering a basic set of services. It is a data-rich environment that every service provider should be able to leverage. ”
Goodwin believes that without collaboration, channel partners can no longer say that they have a full UC offering. Collaboration is a critical part of the UC environment today, particularly as the workplace becomes more dispersed and mobile.
“If resellers aren’t already in this journey with collaboration technology, then they need to make the change now”
Partner Recruitment
For resellers and channel partners that want to create a full-stack solution for their customers, Gather makes it very easy for any company to get on board. The solution is deployed on a global mesh network that’s tested for quality & resiliency. Scott noted that Gather has multiple POPs [points of presence] in Europe, North America and Asia” with global MPLS network partner and 6 points of presence, we can provide incredible quality of service, while providing 24/7 SIP monitoring and tracing tools all the way down to the end user level”.
Gather is at a point now where it’s ready to go with a fully proven solution for its partners. “We built this offering to make it easier for resellers to access, simple to deploy, low risk with fantastic revenue generating potential. You don’t need to be a traditional cloud communications provider to see the benefits too. You can put this offering alongside an IT proposition or anything else. This offering is equally attractive to anyone that holds a relationship with small to mid-sized businesses and enterprises. The greatest advantage is that customers are adopting collaboration services for their own purposes and Gather helps service providers access this demand.
And what for the future, where is collaboration going? Scott told me; “You’ll see a greater influence from AI – within the next 6 months you’ll see the first release of empathy analysis whereby it will be able to score the meetings independently to judge how well the meetings went. Within a year I suspect facial recognition will also become part of this story, ever deeper and intuitive integrations into third parties, Gather has just completed its integration into Slack which will be a continuing trend.”
