ChannelVision Magazine

Core Communications At the same time, agents are still far from ready to stop selling carrier services, drop their premises-based voice solutions and switch completely to the cloud, at least within the near term. Indeed, a full 80 percent say they are not likely to switch to 100 percent cloud in the next 18 to 24 months, while a similar percentage of respondents are not likely to stop selling car- rier services during that time, with 60 percent of agent respondents “not at all likely” to give up their carrier services relationships. What’s more, large percentages of MSPs and agents still have serious concerns and disap- pointments with regard to the current UCaaS/ CCaaS landscape, show figures from the survey performed on behalf of LANtelligence by Corlea Group, and providers that can offer a solid de- ployment process, stellar post-project support and some level of differentiation from the crowd will do best to increase partner confidence and engagement moving forward. Among the MSPs surveyed, only half of respondents from Canada currently sell voice services, while 83 percent of U.S.-based MSP currently sell voice. Those MSPs in the U.S. and Canada who do sell voice services obviously prefer cloud over premises-based offerings, with the vast majority, and 100 percent of Canadian respondents, selling or re-selling some cloud- based voice services. By Martin Vilaboy MSP &Agent UCaaS Concerns A ccording to a new survey of North American agents and MSPs, there remains high interest in increasing the amount of cloud-based voice services offered by these groups of channel partners, and specifically unified communications and call center as a service (UCaaS/CCaaS). Channel Vision | January - February, 2018 38