Veteran collaboration and channel specialist Greg Plum has launched his new venture, Plum Unified Communications.
PlumUC focuses on collaboration assessment, purchase and implementation, with a portfolio of unified communications and conferencing solutions.
“While this may come as a surprise to many, those of you who know me best understand that I have always wanted to branch out and do my own thing,” Plum said in a LinkedIn post cleverly dubbed ‘Plum Crazy.’ He added, “Over the years, I have read enough anecdotes and advice in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and Fast Company to start my own Dear Abby column for suffering small business owners.”
PlumUC is the product of almost three decades of business development efforts in various industries, including banking, real estate and telecommunications. Plum himself has spent the last 15 years in the conferencing and collaboration space, building teams of channel partners for a range of companies, from facilities-based providers to startups–most notably at the Conference Group, StartMeeting.com and SoundConnect.
“With the introduction of PlumUC, I am excited to pull from this diverse experience and offer my partners in both the telecom and IT channels, and their customers, a comprehensive platform of UC (think Microsoft Lync) and conferencing/collaboration services, coupled with the knowledge and ability to effectively assess our customers’ needs and deliver the best combination of services to meet those needs,” Plum said.
The company will hinge on a channel distribution strategy, and partnership options include a self-service wholesale partner program with “aggressive buy prices,” as well as a full-service, revenue-share-based, concierge service with the PlumUC Strategic Partner Program.
The wholesale model is for partners that want to design their own service, while the latter provides partners who are less familiar with the intricacies of conferencing and UC options the option to work jointly with PlumUC to assess customer needs, make recommendations and fully on-board and educate their customers with the suite of services.
“You can think of these programs as self-service and full-service options,” Plum said. “Both provide access to just about every service offering available in the industry across all major service providers.”