Let’s be honest, being in the middle isn’t always seen as a good thing. “Middle of the road” isn’t an especially flattering description, while being “piggy in the middle” isn’t a desirable position. But when it comes to the mid-market, then I think we can find middle ground…
That’s because the mid-market is essentially the engine room of the UK economy. According to business advisory firm BDO, mid-sized businesses account for one-third of UK private sector turnover and added more jobs to the economy last year than smaller businesses and FTSE 350 companies combined.
That sort of performance should make the mid-market attractive to IT vendors, with plenty of offerings packaged to the sector’s needs. Unfortunately, all too often, we find that mid-market customers are overlooked by vendors, who either focus on their larger enterprise customers, or provide consumer-level solutions that don’t deliver the scalability mid-market companies need.
Mid-market companies are also facing the same challenges from digital disruption as larger enterprises, while often having made considerable infrastructure investment that they don’t want to abandon overnight. While very small companies are often able to take the plunge and leverage new trends such as the cloud, mid-market companies may not have as much flexibility and agility to adapt.
Still, with 88 percent of UK businesses having implemented cloud, according to the Cloud Industry Forum, mid-sized companies clearly are moving to the cloud today. The good news is that moving to the cloud doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. Cloud migration is not a black-and-white, in-or-out decision, it can be a continuum.
In the communications and collaboration space, we are seeing strong interest in hybrid deployments – with companies looking to maintain their legacy investment while looking at moving new applications such as voice, video, and contact center, into the cloud.
For our channel partners, that means there is a clear opportunity if they can deliver the same rich communications experiences in whatever way their end-user customers want to deploy them – be that on-premises, hybrid cloud or fully hosted.
With Avaya IP Office, we offer a solution that can fit the needs of 98 percent of all businesses out there, and we can offer it in on-premises, hybrid cloud, or pure cloud models. That means businesses can move to the cloud at their own pace and path, adding new features and capabilities to the cloud as they become needed, or while leveraging their existing investments.
To better enable our channel partners to meet the needs of their customers for this migration, we’ve recently launched the “Powered by Avaya” cloud offering. Based on IP Office, it allows partners to offer unified communications, video conferencing and contact center solutions to their customer base.
Channel partners who wish to host and maintain Avaya cloud services in their own data centers can sell “Powered by Avaya” directly to their customers, with the option to wrap their own services around the core product. We are also working with key wholesale distribution partners to deliver complete cloud solutions to resellers – including billing, provisioning and other back-end systems.
By Danny Drew
