20 01732 759725 Taking control INTERVIEW could be under-served by some of the larger global players. One area where we’ve seen impressive growth through our partners is in the managed office space. We’ve built tools that allow bridging between accounts so that they can have on-net calls, messages and presence shared between companies that are owned by the same reseller but operate as individual businesses. TR: So, integrations are one element of the transition from telco to techco. What else is involved? James Lockhart: There are probably three key pillars for us. The first is CX tools, or customer experience tools, that give SMEs in particular access to contact centre features that in the past they wouldn’t have been able to deploy because they were too expensive and were generally built for a broader scale of organisation. The second pillar is integrations that allow, again, predominantly SMEs to have access to that ecosystem of SaaS tools, from CRMs to communications platform to things like single sign-on that in the past they may not have been able to do. The third pillar, in which integrations also play a part, is vertical propositions. In the past, our industry would have talked about verticalisation, when what they really meant was industry landing pages with some of the right language to draw the customer in. That’s not enough anymore. For us, this pillar is about building the communications tools that we offer into the workflows that customers already have; it’s about understanding the compliance requirements and the user journey of the business, the pain points that they have; and it’s about building full commercial propositions as well. The general business model that UCaaS providers have traditionally gone to market with is no longer sufficient – it doesn’t scale in the right way because people’s usage patterns are different. TR: Simon, this is a question for you. Are there particular areas of the market that are responding to this proposition? Simon Blackwell: Definitely. We’re predominantly a channel business, and the same underlying platform. That creates a lot of limitations in how you can develop your product, how you can differentiate it and how quickly and securely you can build. We wanted to be unique in terms of owning our own IP and our own technology stack, so in 2022 we took a majority private equity investment from a Londonbased fund called Queens Park Equity. That enabled us to go out and acquire our own IP, which we did the same year. We bought a business called Yay.com that owns its own IP, its own design, its own code base which has made us the masters of our own destiny and enabled us to move from the open source solutions that we built beforehand to 100% proprietary IP. We’ve gone from a traditional telco model to a full SaaS model and that’s quite unique in this market. Before, any UK business that wanted an IP owner was probably going to be buying an American product, not a British one. TR: How has having your own IP affected the development of your platform? James Lockhart: Our ethos as a business, and what we mean by ‘going from telco to techco’, is to be a true SaaS house where every line of code is written by our own developers in our own offices. This allows us to pivot for our partners in ways that have given them unprecedented success, particuarly in certain niche areas. We can pivot our roadmap how we choose, when we choose and we can adapt to real world opportunities as they arise. It’s made us far more agile as a vendor. TR: Can you give some examples of what this has enabled you to do for your partners? James Lockhart: Two big areas for us are our ability to integrate with CRMs and vertical-specific software tools that might not be broad enough for some of the larger players to invest time and effort in – some of the American vendors that Simon referenced. What that enables our partners to do is build something that is entirely bespoke through us. Secondly, we’re able to build features that meet specific use cases that, again, Nebula, a provider of cloud-based workplace communications software for voice, messaging, customer experience and analytics, is building on last year’s focus on partner engagement and enablement, which powered the acquisition of 50,000 net-new CallSwitch One users, with the official launch of a new MSP Partner Programme. The programme, announced in October at the North Star by Nebula partner event, is now officially live, giving the company’s 600-plus partners access to enhanced training, sales enablement and go-to-market support tailored to the needs of three partner tiers – Certified, Premium and Elite. At the Certified level, the focus is on getting partners to market quickly by providing technical training, pre-sales support and white-label automated assets. As partners win more customers and progress to the Premium and Elite tiers, the focus becomes increasingly commercial, with structured sales training, digital performance audits, exhibition support, targeted B2B prospecting data, more marketing funds and early access to new platform capabilities. Shortly after the programme was announced, Technology Reseller caught up with Nebula Chief Marketing Officer Simon Blackwell and Head of Product James Lockhart to find out more about Nebula’s platform and why it is such a compelling offering for MSPs. We started out by asking how the business, which has been active in the UCaaS space for around nine years in various guises, was evolving to meet the needs of its channel partners and the 200,000 users of its platform. Technology Reseller: One of the things I have noticed in your marketing is the wording ‘from telco to techco’. What do you mean by that and why is it significant for your channel partners? Simon Blackwell: In our space a lot of solutions are based on platforms like Asterisk and Kamailio. There’s a huge amount of open source and a huge amount of upcycling, so what you end with are patchwork solutions that all derive from Chief Marketing Officer Simon Blackwell and Head of Product James Lockhart explain how owning its own IP enables Nebula Cloud to be more agile and responsive to the needs of its channel partners and their customers
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