Intermedia Cloud Communications has announced a strategic expansion of its partner program tailored to meet the distinct challenges faced by service providers (SPs). With a proven track record of success in building cloud communications and collaboration businesses for partners, including many SPs, Intermedia is intensifying its focus on the SP community to help them deliver competitive and profitable unified communications, collaboration and customer experience solutions under their own brand.

Recognizing and Addressing Service Provider Pain Points

With an estimated 400-million-plus aging, inflexible and costly legacy business phone system seats that have yet to migrate to a more mobile, secure and reliable cloud-based way to work, the opportunity for SPs is significant. However, there are a number of current and future obstacles that SPs, in particular, must address in order to cost-effectively deliver and support modern unified communications solutions:

• Decline of the Softswitch Era: Traditional central office softswitch platforms face deprecation, pushing SPs to seek modern solutions.
• Inefficient Investments: Investments in voice infrastructure and supporting processes lack alignment with profitable growth.
• Challenges to Building Proprietary Solutions: Building their own solution is impractical, taking too long and costing too much.
• Brand Marginalization: SPs prefer to leverage their own brand, rather than simply reselling another vendor's brand and diluting the SP's brand equity.
• Customer Disintermediation: SPs are losing customers to over-the-top UCaaS providers due to limitations in the SPs' current platforms.
• Critical Customer Ownership: Retaining customer ownership while maintaining brand is crucial for SPs.

"Amid the challenges in the unified communications space, service providers require strategic solutions to bring to their business customers," said Rob Arnold, principal analyst, Frost & Sullivan. "It's critical for service providers to find more than just a solution, they need a partner invested in their success and able to support them though the entire customer life cycle."

All-in-One Answer

As the partner-first provider of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions, Intermedia is uniquely qualified to help a greater number of SPs deliver the unified communications solutions that their business customers are seeking and adopting in record numbers.

Intermedia's AI-powered, all-in-one communications suite features the communications, collaboration and customer care solutions needed to help support a more mobile, efficient and productive workforce, including voice, chat, SMS, video conferencing, contact center, file sharing and backup, multichannel archiving and more.

Couple this with Intermedia's innovative reseller partner program and 360-degree approach to partner support, and the formula for SP unified communications success emerges. Highlights of Intermedia's Partner Program for SPs include:

• Cloud-based solution: Intermedia's solutions are consumed by SPs as they sell. No hardware to purchase, manage and maintain.
• Wholesale Model with Strong Economics: SPs purchase the solution wholesale from Intermedia, determine their sales prices and own their customer relationships — helping to reduce churn and ultimately increase the SPs' bottom-line profitability.
• Brand as Your Own: SPs are able to brand the solutions as their own to sustain and strengthen their market presence and differentiation.
• Customer Relationship Ownership: Partners retain ownership of the customer relationship and are equipped to provide high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Flexibility and Choice: SPs have the flexibility to set and manage pricing, bundle other services and incorporate new offers into their portfolios.
• Comprehensive Support: Partners receive comprehensive sales, marketing, training, onboarding, ordering, billing and seven-time J.D. Power-certified technical support — and much more — to help ensure lasting, differentiated and competitive success.
• Reliability and Safety: Intermedia's proprietary UC/CC stack, backed by 99.999% uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs), offers a secure and highly reliable platform for SPs and their customers.
• Bring Your Own PSTN: With Intermedia, SPs can choose to use their own trunks and DIDs or use Intermedia's telecommunications infrastructure.

"As the cloud communications market continues its evolution, so do the incredible opportunities for service providers," said Jonathan McCormick, COO and CRO, Intermedia. "This commitment to expanding our Partner Program for service providers underscores our promise to provide partners with the essential tools for recognizing and seizing the vast opportunities that the future of unified communications holds and removing the obstacles that might get in their way."

In other news,  Intermedia has announced that Intermedia Archiving's 30-day retention option is now available for free to new and existing users of the all-in-one communications and collaboration solution, Intermedia Unite.

Named Best Business Phone System by U.S. News and World Report and Best Overall Business VoIP by PC Magazine, Intermedia Unite combines voice, video, chat/SMS, contact center, file management and more on one tightly integrated, highly secure and reliable platform. By adding Intermedia Archiving to Unite, businesses are now able to have continual historical access to their Unite call recordings, video meetings, chats and SMS — with contact center engagements slated to follow soon.

Intermedia's state-of-the-art archiving platform is more than just information storage; Intermedia Archiving is designed to safeguard vital business information and communications from accidental or inappropriate deletion, assist with dispute resolutions, support compliance with internal governance, address legal and regulatory requirements, maintain information continuity, training and coaching, and much more. It offers a secure, searchable record to help quickly identify and retrieve relevant interactions, with a powerful contextual search capability based on a view of all users across different channels.

And now, Intermedia is making Intermedia Archiving available for free to all current and new Intermedia Unite users with a rolling, 30-day retention period. The 30-day rolling archive helps businesses better manage and maintain their data, preserving the most recent 30 days of communications. If a customer wishes to extend their data retention period beyond 30 days, seamless upgrades to longer-term options ranging from one to 10 years are available at any time.

Since its launch in early 2023, Intermedia Archiving for Unite has gained wide interest and traction not only among Intermedia's customers, but the broader communications industry, having recently received the 2023 Best Practices New Product Innovation Award from preeminent analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan.

"As Intermedia continues to transform businesses communications, we are excited to announce the addition of free Intermedia Archiving for all Intermedia Unite users," said Irina Shamkova, executive vice president of product management, Intermedia. "Businesses' day-to-day communications are often filled with valuable knowledge, intellectual property and insights; with Archiving's centralized platform, organizations can leverage their communications, protect themselves, build insights across all available channels, and support various productivity, legal and compliance requirements."

Intermedia Archiving will continue to evolve this year, as it becomes a data-warehouse foundation for business data intelligence and insights. As part of an aggressive development road map in 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics are expected to be integrated to further offer innovative data-analysis capabilities. These planned value-added features and capabilities are intended to enable businesses to make more informed decisions to help drive revenue, increase efficiency, and reduce overall operational costs. No matter the size of the organization, the opportunities and benefits of analyzing archived communications data can be significant across industries, including professional services firms (legal, accounting, etc.), financial, automotive, hospitality and leisure, government, health  care and many more.