technologyreseller.co.uk 21 INTERVIEW that might not be au fait with all the possibilities inherent in the transition from telco to techco? Simon Blackwell: Our partner base is really mixed. Some are very familiar with voice, but others will be new to it, in some cases because it has traditionally been quite complicated. For us, it’s very much a case of Click to Deploy. James always talks about the fact that the thing partners love most about our platform is the fact you can spin up a user quickly. You can get them going quickly. You can start billing your customer quickly, which is so, so important. Then, there’s the whole education piece. The Nebula Training Academy is something we’ve had in various guises pretty much the whole time that we’ve been around. Eight hundred people went through that Training Academy in 2025, learning about everything from how to use the portal to how to set stuff up to new features and new add-ons that they can monetise. For example, we recently launched a whole analytics package. Unlike our competitors who have to bolt on other products to make that happen, it’s all done in-house by us, but you still need to train the partner, you still need to familiarise them with it so they have the confidence to go out and sell it. So, we have a really detailed training program on all aspects of the new analytics package. We also do compliance training to keep partners abreast of the latest Ofcom requirements because we all have skin in that game and responsibility there. That’s been well received and is a key part of our proposition. TR: And have the ability to adapt to new technologies like AI. How is AI impacting your product offering, and what might the roadmap be in the future? James Lockhart: There’s no unified communications provider in our space that is not either deploying AI or working on deploying AI. That’s a given, and we’re no different. We spent quite a lot of 2025 fleshing out a proposition that we want to go to market with in 2026. As Simon said, our ethos as a true SaaS house is that we want to own as much of a product as we can. Unlike a lot of our competitors, it’s not enough for us to rely on tokens sending call data out to public models. We want to host LLMs in our own infrastructure, on our own GPUs and we want to make sure that what we provide to our partners is scalable and cost-effective. Most importantly, we really want to protect their data and the data of their customers. AI’s a huge part of our roadmap for 2026. Obviously, as a predominantly voice provider, the bulk of what we’re doing is around voice transcription and the data that comes from those transcriptions, everything from sentiment analysis through to call summaries. Live agent assistance is going to be really important for us in 2026, all the way through to fully fledged voice agents that can handle queries and in some case actually action those queries. TR: How are you helping your partners maximise the opportunities in your market, especially those that come from the IT side who might not be familiar with voice, but also voice resellers all of our intelligent sales, if you like, our solution sales are done through channel partners. That’s why partners exist. We’re definitely seeing that some verticals are more active than others. That might in part be due to the partners who work with us, but we spend a lot of time working with industry analysts as well, which helps us sense-check the direction we’re going in and helps James validate his roadmap choices as well. We know that healthcare is still a big play for MSPs – you don’t need an analyst to tell you that. We’re seeing a lot more specialisms around recruitment and integrations with recruitment-specific CRMs. We’re seeing the same in residential lettings and sales. We’re seeing it in managed office spaces. There are some unique industries out there that have CRMs and workflow tools that are specific just to them and owning our own code base means that we can build that stuff really, really quickly and give a partner who is active in a particular market something to differentiate themselves. James Lockhart: The other thing is, the more industries have ecosystems of tools built purely for them, the broader the options they have, the more complex the deployments become, the greater the compliance aspects. As a result, we’re seeing pretty impressive growth in the channel space with trusted providers who supply everything from comms tools through to software through to cyber. They want to go to one provider where they can buy the whole package as a solution sale. continued...
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