What Collaboration And UC-Savvy Channel Partners Need To Know

Unified communications (UC) and collaboration products and services have been a notoriously hard sell. Organizations often try to adopt one vendor's offering, while their employees are going rogue and downloading consumer applications to satisfy their communication needs and wants while they do their work.

But small to mid-sized businesses -- as well as enterprises – want to get a handle on their communication and collaboration strategies, and there's plenty of room for solution providers to help. Dimension Data – No. 10 on CRN’s 2015 Solution Provider 500 list - recently released its Connected Enterprise report for 2016, which examined the state of the UC and collaboration markets. Those markets include a wide swath of voice, video, instant messaging, content sharing and enterprise social premise-based and cloud-based tools. The report, which included responses from 900 organizations, highlighted problem spots many of them face, such as lack of a collaboration strategy, and lack of integration between disparate, enterprise-grade products and services.  

In this Q&A, Ian Heard (pictured), senior vice president of Dimension Data's customer experience and collaboration business unit, shared noteworthy findings from the report, as well as how partners can help address integration pain points and encourage widespread adoption of collaboration tools among employees so businesses can get the most bang for their buck.