TBI Reports 700% SD-WAN Surge, 'Explosive' UCaaS, CCaaS Growth

TBI is reporting massive revenue growth as partners adopt new networking and communications technologies.

The master agent saw more than 700% year-over-year SD-WAN growth from 2017 to 2018. Vice president of marketing Corey Cohen said such a large growth number validates all the hype that has surrounded SD-WAN.

TBI’s Corey Cohen

“We’ve been talking about SD-WAN for the last three years, and now we’re not just seeing momentum, but we’re actually seeing significant revenue,” Cohen told Channel Partners. “That software-defined approach to not just networking, but to business in general, affords agents the opportunity to see it.”

And partners are also seeing tangible success selling cloud — another subject of boisterous fanfare and hoopla.

“They’re getting the fact that cloud is real and something that they’re able to sell. Those that were ill-prepared for it have now taken the steps to become educated and become that new type of agent, to sell connectivity into the cloud and to sell cloud applications and cloud solutions,” she said.

SD-WAN isn’t the only hot technology. UCaaS and CCaaS both saw year-over-year growth in the 100s, even after previous years of strong growth. Partners feel both excited and comfortable selling both technologies, according to TBI senior VP Mike Onystok.

TBI’s Mike Onystok

“The momentum is greater than it’s ever been for the UCaaS and CCaaS space,” Onystok said.

But the master agent already is looking ahead to the next opportunity in CPaaS. CPaaS, or communications platform as a service as the full moniker goes, entails using APIs to integrate voice, messaging and other communications applications into existing platforms.

The growing demands for contact centers build a solid case for why CPaaS may be the next evolution. Call Centre Helper Magazine said the benchmark time to response for some call centers has dropped to answering 90% of calls within 15 seconds. And customers’ expected wait-times for social media and SMS interactions are shrinking as well.

“These are crazy expectations, but something that almost every business is striving to achieve, and many have successfully with the deployment of CCaaS, answering them on social within minutes. Responding and knowing their questions with AI the minute they’ve come through a chatbot and having an actual live person address the issue the first time without passing them along,” Cohen said. “Adding the API integration into existing environments to enhance the customer experience and make it so that the customers have a very personalized feel – whether it’s the dentist or whether it is an online retailer – is paramount to the evolution of where business is going in 2020.”

Onystok noted that all of the main communications players have invested in CPaaS or made a related acquisition. 8×8 this summer purchased Wavecell to add a CPaaS solution. Vonage acquired CPaaS provider Nexmo in addition to contact center provider NewVoiceMedia.

Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold

Jon Arnold, who researches IP communications for J Arnold &Associates, said Vonage’s acquisitions illustrates how many cloud providers feel about the future of the market.

“To cover their bases and maximize their…… opportunity, they feel they need to have a UC play, a contact center play, and increasingly a CPaaS play, ” Arnold said. “The other players are doing this to varying degrees. Some are betting more heavily on it than others.”

Arnold said one of the biggest CPaaS benefits is how it makes other applications more sticky.

“I’m a little skeptical about the revenue-generating potential for CPaaS. Because it’s a very much a developer-centric technology, it’s not a consumable service like VoIP or conferencing. It’s a platform to give developers tools to build new things, which in turn can be sold, monetized or simply added to increase the value of something else,” he said.

Onystok said CPaaS, along with UCaaS and CCaaS, has helped expanded and diversify TBI’s channel. VARs, for example, have been drawn to the technologies.

“There are a lot of new, unique type of partners that are coming into the space because of UCaaS and CCaaS and CPaaS — from different channels that all make this one a much larger channel. The opportunity is better than it’s ever been. And there’s no there’s been no better time to be in this space than now,” he said.

TBI recently signed supplier agreements with Netfortris, CoreSite and TeraGo Networks.