Compliance Partners Set to Benefit from 'Lucrative Market'

Having amassed more than $2.5 billion in compliance-related tariffs – companies of all sizes are starting to acknowledge the significance of compliance, and channel partners hope to capture a sliver of that compliance-related revenue.

By many projections, the compliance arena should undergo considerable growth over a ten-year period, which spans 2023-2032, with some estimates placing that number as high as $111 billion by the latter half of that projection timeframe. In 2023, according to the same forecasters at Fortune Business Insights, the global enterprise governance, risk and compliance market size will hit nearly $40 billion.

While the compliance industry presents many prospects for compliance partners, there are still some cutting corners on the compliance front, as evident by the over $2.5 billion in fines companies have racked up.

Theta Lake chief commercial officer Anthony Cresci, whose company found its niche in the compliance sphere, told Channel Futures that compliance is a "wildly lucrative market" for channel partners looking to put their hat into the ring. Companies operating in a highly-regulated industries like banking, finance, healthcare, etc., all face in their communication channels the same scrutiny "that mandate capture, long-term retention, and supervision of those communications," Cresci told Channel Futures.

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That traverses a broad spectrum of channels, from email to voice, texting to whiteboard, project management apps, enterprise social and even in-meeting eComms, Cresci said. That does not even scratch the surface when addressing the needs of legacy communication platform users – Cresci added.

Hardships for Compliance Partners Not Without Rewards

According to Cresci, one of the challenges for customers, and in turn, partners, involves unifying their compliance across the growing number of disparate comms channels.

"Historically, they have leveraged different vendors to capture and retain different types of content, eComms in one place, with voice in another, etc., but this makes it very difficult to perform eDiscovery, review, investigation, and surveillance if the content is in different places," he said.

Now, he added, vendors can unify the capture and retention of all types of content, including text, voice, video, whiteboard, SMS and WhatsApp – with what Cresci called "more advanced capabilities," including rendering all of those communications within one single timeline, so reviewers can see and understand all of the context of the comms regardless of which channel it occurred on.

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Since the more modern approach to compliance is cloud-based, this ties itself to all kinds of partner opportunities, "that is because their primary pricing model is a subscription and creates 'very-attractive' recurring revenue streams," Cresci said.

Compliance A 'Natural Segment' For the Channel

Calling compliance a "natural segment" for the compliance channel, Cresci said compliance is adjacent to what happens with security.
"In addition, many of those partners who focus on unified communications want to generate additional revenue streams and find ways to add more customer value," he told Channel Futures.

That includes UC seats partners have already sold, Cresci said.

"The other important factor for compliance partners in the channel is that they can take a more holistic approach and partner with a vendor that supports all UC and collab platforms instead of working with a vendor that only solves compliance for one platform, e.g., Microsoft Teams," Cresci said.

Another yet equally important monkey wrench thrown into the equation is generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has those in the compliance arena scratching their heads trying to figure out, "specifically how it gets embedded into the underlying UC and communication platforms, such as with Zoom AI Companion, Microsoft Copilot, or RingCentral RingSense," Cresci said.

Said solutions, the Theta Lake exec noted, while supplying a lot of advanced functionality, in many cases, can create more communication content subject to compliance regulations, meaning that things can become convoluted to wrap one's head around.

That amounts to an additional, yet equally imperative channel opportunity – the channel and its expertise in the area of trusted advisors.