The communications industry has transformed considerably over recent years. The traditional market model has been altered by new entrants to the industry in the form of aggressive over the top providers and cloud giants. Resellers and service providers have been required to change their go-to-market approaches to remain relevant and competitive.
Even after changing their modes of operations, channel centric providers may still be at a disadvantage when they come up against larger competitors. Unity appears to be the best way for smaller providers to ensure their voices are heard within and increasingly crowded industry.
During Vectors 2019, SkySwitch's annual user conference, the inaugural meeting of the Cloud Voice Alliance (CVA) took place. The CVA has been formerly launched at this year's event - with the support of white label platform provider SkySwitch - but is completely independent and is open to new members who operate potentially competitive platforms.
UC Today spoke with the CVA's Executive Director, Jeff Dworkin, to understand more about the group's structure and objectives. Providing its members with tools, cutting edge technology, consolidated buying power and industry visibility the CVA hopes to aide its members so that they can be as successful as possible in the rapidly expanding UCaaS market.
“Our mission is to give our members - the local UCaaS providers - a real voice in the industry. We want end customers to know that they don't have to go to a giant UCaaS provider when they can get better products, solutions and service from some of the great local providers out there."
Often smaller local providers can legitimately out perform larger multi-national providers when it comes to feature sets, business benefits and cost effectiveness, but cannot when it comes to marketing. Large international providers often spend a huge proportion of their revenue on aggressive marketing strategies that smaller local businesses cannot match. Making customers aware of the benefits of using local providers will be one of the key aims for the newly formed CVA by providing power in numbers.
