Wildix has integrated its core unified communications platform with Datto’s Autotask PSA solution.
The new tie-in gives MSPs click-to-call access to clients from directly within one of their most important business applications, among other new capabilities, according to Tim Truelove, Wildix’s Americas region country manager.
“It integrates with our collaboration, pulling in call history, call recording, and things of that nature,” he said last week during a conversation with ChannelPro at the latest SMB Forum event in Los Angeles last week. Datto has been a Kaseya business unit since June.
Wildix recently announced plans to hold its 2023 UC&C Summit partner event just over two months from now on January 17th. Like its two most recent predecessors, the conference will be hosted online. The scarcity of new business opportunities at a time of increasing commoditization in communication services will be among the top themes covered during the show.
“Our focus is on how to become the expert in the market today,” Truelove says, “bring back that expertise so that you’re a business consultant instead of just saying, ‘let me slap in a telephone for you.'”
Offerings like Wildix’s Kite real-time communications service, which can be embedded in a customer’s website, enable partners to provide differentiated answers to competitive challenges rather than me-too VoIP and SMS connections, he continues.
“We train our partners on how to customize the solution and how to think out of the box,” Truelove says, adding that Wildix solutions enable end users to reduce time spent on daily operations by 25%.
“That’s two hours a day. That’s 10 hours a week. That’s 40 hours a month,” Truelove observes. “Putting the proper business tools in place for a customer means that you can now get a full additional work week out of every employee.”
A former Wildix partner who was previously the vendor’s director of sales, Truelove stepped into his current role in September. Extending earlier investments in partner enablement and support are among his top early priorities.
“We’ve increased staff in the U.S. by 40% this year alone, and I plan to increase that another 50% by next year,” he says.
Many of those newcomers will join the customer service success department Wildix added this year, which tackles routine payment and provisioning issues, leaving more time for the company’s partner development managers and business managers to focus on strategic consultation. Resources like that are characteristic of Wildix’s channel program, Truelove says, which offers rich benefits to a concentrated set of proven, committed partners.
“In the first 90 days, we spend about $30,000 with our partners,” he says. “That’s onboarding of sales, marketing, technical operations, logistics, admin, the whole nine yards.”
Unified communications and collaboration revenue climbed 11.4% year over year to $14.8 billion in the second quarter of 2022, the most recent for which sales data is available, according to IDC.
