CCaaS Provider Content Guru Wants to 'Challenge the Status Quo'

Content Guru is aggressively seeking expansion into the Americas via its channel, which brings it upward of 75% of its business. The contact center provider's head of channels for the Americas says the vendor is even eyeing new partner types in the public sector, along with those that comprise the technology service distributor (TSD) channel.

The shift toward ramping up its presence in the Americas comes as Content Guru has become the "de facto contact center provider in Europe" since its 2005 inception. The CCaaS provider also has made inroads in Asia Pacific.

It is, however, the Americas that brings the potential for loftier revenue shares, we learned from Eric Kinsey, who serves as Content Guru's senior director of channels for the Americas.

He told Channel Futures one of the only challenges standing in its way stems from an awareness problem, as it is well known in other regions but not so well known for its CCaaS background in the Americas.

As such, Kinsey says he wants to lean in on its "challenger" status in Gartner's CCaaS Magic Quadrant report to "challenge the status quo" in the contemporary CCaaS arena.

Content Guru Looks to Woo TSDs, Public Sector Partners

Kinsey told Channel Futures about the vendor recently earning FedRAMP authorization from the U.S. Department of State.

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Content Guru's Eric Kinsey

What's more, it's awaiting an assessment from FedRAMP's project management office for what it hopes will result in "high authorization," a move that will make it the first full-stack CCaaS solution to earn the distinction. Earning said accreditation might prove a significant partner selling point.

Kinsey has a lengthy and storied history in unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and CCaaS, having served as head of alliances at Observe.ai, been a senior channel manager at Genesys, regional channel leader for Avaya Cloud Office, along with various channel-facing roles at NICE, boasting nearly 30 years of channel experience. He says his most recent endeavor with Content Guru makes sense due to the growing appeal of CCaaS.

"CCaaS is such a high-growth area," Kinsey said.

As for going after new partner types, Kinsey shared that Content Guru plans to attend industry events, sponsor them and even educate at those events to capture more TSDs that they see as increasingly valuable to their foray into the Americas.

That list of events includes Enterprise Connect and CCW, at which Content Guru plans to do plenty of education around its product.

"We have invested an enormous amount of dollars and resources to those respective angles," Kinsey said.

Fresh Deals On the Table

Content Guru has partnerships with Intelisys, SanSource and Telarus, most recently signing an agreement with Bridgepointe Technologies, solidifying relationships with some of the most sizable technology purveyors in the Americas thus far.

"We have also done things like sponsor master classes, which becomes a boot camp for education and enablement for those partners," Kinsey said.

The hope in doing so is to give Content Guru the awareness boost it's hoping to achieve, thereby challenging some of the most noteworthy players on their playground who capture a large market share.

Kinsey says partners have multiple opportunities to make money with Content Guru, and that's sometimes as effortless as having a conversation with existing customers to introduce them to Content Guru.

That potential for elevated and recurring revenue further comes from the fact that Content Guru has a CCaaS solution it charges for and a separate artificial intelligence (AI) suite of tools coming at a different price, while extending a direct way to make money on AI.