Key Takeaways from Zyxel and Zultys’ Q&A Session - Zyxel & Zultys offer Complete Network and Voice Solutions to Partners

As you are already aware, we had two webinars on "Zyxel & Zultys offer Complete Network and Voice Solutions to Partners". And due to the overwhelming results of the first webinar, we brought another live webinar with the same topic. So, we gathered some key takeaways from the Q&A session of Tri Nguyen, Zyxel Networks Market Development Manager, and Justin Bush Zultys' Vice President of Sales.

Tri: How do you view Unified Communication?
Justin: UC is the ability to unify all forms of communications whether it's a phone call, a chat, an SMS, a web chat, and call center activity. We want to take everything and make it all easy to use in one platform to be able to communicate. The way we look at it today, you should be able to meet your customers where they want to communicate and not force them to do what you are used to doing. That's what unified communication is. Everything is put in one single pane of glass.

Tri: How are things moving to the cloud? How does that affect the whole service or the business model? What's that transition looking like today?
Justin: What we look at today is what the big thing we must watch or the underlying network. The cloud is in somebody else’s hardware, so we have multiple data centers across the country that we put our hardware into. But there still must be a delivery point from that local connectivity. It's harder to get people to fix the network issues which can cause a lot of problems. Today networking connectivity or the key point is of getting the cloud system working. So, are we delivering a good network? That is why Zultys uses Zyxel because we know Zyxel is a great network piece to be able to put in there, to be able to connect that to our data centers.

Tri: Do you see people moving to break-fix or is really scaled towards the recurring revenue kind of scenario?
Justin: The majority of our partners are moving to recurring revenue models. At the end of the day, it's the right thing to do for your customers and for your organization. The break-fix model is to enable people to stay outside of that recurring revenue and it doesn't always do that in the biggest favor at the end of the day. If I know I got a recurring contact, I know I'm going to do great service with them, and at the break-fix model what they end up with "Well hey I'm busy. I've got all these priority customers and your break-fix is not just going to be my priority." So, the majority of partners that we have today are in that recurring revenue.

Tri: Why is a voice so important? What are the benefits that are there? Sometimes people see voice as a commodity. How do you get your way in or get your way to maybe a new customer or switch somebody over to an existing voice contract?
Justin: If your core business is managed services, we want to help you sell more of your core products. One of the things we look at is voice, is really an easy way to open the door because people view it as a commodity and utility. At the end of the day when people walk in it's really easy to say "Hey Larry can I get a copy of your phone bill? I think I can save you 30% to 40% if you just give me a copy of your phone bill." And Larry replies, "Heck yeah. I'll give you a copy of my phone bill." Now that is the start of the conversation. Whereas if I'm knocking at the door and say "Hey I'd like to run a network analysis tool on here. I'd like to run it for two days. Is that ok?" I guarantee that the answer is no if I'm just walking through the door. But on the phone person, there's really a good chance you can walk out of the phone bill. Because yeah, you can lower that cost, that's really important. One thing we think it does - it allows us to build a trusting relationship with somebody. The person would answer "I can look at this. I can lower the bill. By the way, if we're doing this together, we also supply network." It's a good thing as we're going through the process of what your network looks like. Now it’s a better relationship standpoint versus starting with something else.

To learn more about the Q&A session, go to the recording here.