69 2024 DIRECTORY | CHANNELVISION 2600Hz, Ooma Leverage One Another to Bolster Customization Even before 2600Hz’s October 2023 acquisition by Ooma, a longtime partner and customer, it had a well-established reputation in the channel community. Now part of the communication solutions developer’s corporate umbrella, it can take this 20-year heritage in even newer directions. 2600Hz extends support to service providers, MSPs, carriers and telecom resellers, offering them user-friendly products that streamline complex administrative tasks such as device provisioning, user management and cluster monitoring, among other functions. To that end, reseller partners can support deployment, management and other areas. 2600Hz also stands out from other cloud companies by building its own hardware. Despite keeping 2600Hz in operation as its own standalone company, Ooma has big plans for its capabilities. “2600Hz has long made a lot of sense to Ooma, as a company,” said Ooma’s vice president of corporate development, Chris Burgy, who noted plans to parlay 2600Hz’s assets into other areas such as fixed wireless, cellular for primary backup internet and Ooma AirDial, for POTS replacement for specialty devices. “We’re really big proponents of open source,” he continued. “What they’ve done with the platform – and a lot of the duplicative development between the two companies – it just made sense to bring us together to get more scale out of the engineering teams and deliver higher feature velocity. The things we’ve built, they’re also building.” This also makes 2600Hz’s Kazoo flexible turnkey UC platform a natural fit to support the wholesale market. Built using an API-first approach, Kazoo can streamline interfaces within an architecture. Because this can be made truly turnkey, it translates to unique advantages. Another differentiator is that the architecture was built to be reliable across different zones. For U.S. businesses looking to run, for example, across three zones, the potential for failure can ordinarily grow. In this case, however, 2600Hz operates geo-redundant data centers, meaning that all failover is handled seamlessly on the back end to limit and even eliminate downtime. “It’s all very modular,” said Burgy. “If you want to build your own intellectual property around the platform for different user interfaces or integrations, it’s easy to do so for the use case you’re trying to solve, as well as for reliability.” It comes down to better enablement. As channel partners look to create custom solutions within a flexible, scalable platform, UCaaS has largely become commoditized in terms of features, with many of the platforms on the market often viewed as interchangeable. “We’ve taken the same approach, ourselves,” said Burgy. “Digging deeper into verticals and doing unique integrations. That’s how you create value for customers, jumping down that path and not just having swappable platforms. It’s a great solution up market; but it’s stock and standard. Everybody’s just reselling Teams licenses without a lot of opportunities to differentiate themselves versus other channel providers.” With its own longstanding channel program in place, Ooma targets agent VARs by providing them with access to its AirDial POTS replacement solution and other products. This, in turn, allows them to more aggressively shift to the wholesale market, allowing wireless carriers such as T-Mobile and USCellular to resell the solution as well as nextgeneration aggregators and CLECs. “I think that’s going to be really important for channel partners, as we go forward,” said Burgy. “They’re going to need more flexibility to create their own solutions and software.” As it moves forward, Ooma plans to bolster flexibility by increasing its ongoing commitment to the 2600Hz ecosystem, including resources to support go-to-market enablement, marketing and asset advancement. The merger will also lend 2600Hz access to Ooma’s professional services division. This integration will specifically allow partners without their own softwaredevelopment capabilities to rely on the company to handle customization. Ultimately, the marriage between Ooma and 2600Hz provides the customer with additional capabilities and leverage. “We want to see folks be successful,” smiled Burgy, “and we have a lot of our own experience to parlay over to channel partners to accelerate their opportunity to grow.” o For more information on 2600Hz and its new parent company Ooma, visit www.2600Hz.com or call (415) 886-7900. By Brady Hicks. Ooma VP of corporate development, Chris Burgy
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=