Ingram Micro Evolves UC Practice with Red Box Voice Data Deal

With the goal of gaining a foothold in North America, U.K.-based Red Box, the vendor offering a platform for voice, signed a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro.

The Red Box Platform captures voice data from legacy and new voice platforms, on premises or in the cloud. The vendor boasts an open platform architecture that captures and aggregates voice data from across the enterprise into the Red Box Platform, and works with a number of vendor partners, such as Microsoft, Salesforce and Tethr. The company hands back sovereignty of voice data to the client.

“In the last three years, voice data, the value of voice data, and the attributes that voice data have, are being used more widely across different areas of the business,” Red Box CEO Richard Stevenson told Channel Futures. “One of the key markers for us in the U.S. market is that we won a contract with a large financial institution and we’re taking the Red Box Platform across the whole enterprise.”

Red Box, in business since 1988, has been a specialist capturing voice communications that largely revolved around compliance and regulation in markets such as call centers, first-responders, financial services and government. The company is focused on the capture of all voice communications across global enterprises, SMEs, and across both new and legacy systems.

The Red Box Platform voice platform can be deployed in cloud, hybrid or on-premises environments and captures and secures millions of calls daily. Seamless integration with leading automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools, combined with an open API philosophy, ensures customers have complete sovereignty over both structured and unstructured voice data sets to leverage within their tools and applications of choice, such as CRM, compliance, business intelligence, AI and analytics tools, or even custom-built applications, the company says.

Ingram Micro’s Stephen Yochum

“When you talk about voice, you have to think of it more about information or data. As we’re evolving our unified communications practice, not only in the U.S. but globally with Ingram Micro, we were noticing that all of the [voice] information that was being captured was being ‘tossed aside,’ for lack of a better term,” Stephen Yochum, Ingam Micro director and general manager for UC in the U.S., told Channel Futures. “Our partnership with Red Box will allow us to expand our practice with our current UC partners and bring them into that environment and improve that end-user customer experience.”

An established UC partner who is strong in selling voice, the endpoints, dealing with cellphone integration and video conferencing, and so on, has a new opportunity in the data that is voice traffic.

“In today’s world, our partners are very adept at bringing people together whether that be through a platform environment for video, or a voice environment or a combination of the two. They’re good at enabling that type of communication. The next logical step is helping them understand the data that’s available to them through those communications,” Yochum explained.

Today, customers have recordings that they may revisit to coach a call center associate to improve their end-customer’s experience, and that’s across vertical markets. Red Box helps businesses leverage ubiquitous captured and embedded voice data.

Voice communications convey context and sentiment, and Red Box contends that the next wave of consumerization of the workplace will be voice and AI-led communication.

Red Box currently has a U.S. operation; however, “We need to work with an organization like Ingram who understands how our value proposition would play to channel partners, and what partners would like to see and develop,” said Stevenson. “Red Box is working with Ingram to bring standards-compliant recording to their partners, but we’re also going to be introducing additional value propositions such as capturing voice data for AI, biometrics, and the like. All the different value-added services that revolve around voice data, they are the propositions that we are developing and bringing to channel partners.”

Educating partners is key to them understanding the value of voice data.

“It’s not so much about them selling the software as empowering our reseller base to improve that customer experience,” said Yochum.

What partners can expect to see from Ingram Micro going forward is a big education push. The distributor also is working with its technical and engineering teams, working with partners to build out their UC practices. Partners will also see Ingram Micro offer training on how to position voice data with current customers, as well as with new opportunities.

“This offers partners a great opportunity to reengage with their existing client base with an extra set of services that they can offer,” said Yochum.