Zoomtopia: Providing a Stronger Story for Partner Sales

ZOOMTOPIA — Zoom Video Communications on Tuesday unveiled major expansions to its video-first unified communications (UC) platform, new integrations and partnerships, and three new partner support programs.

The announcements were made during this week’s Zoomtopia 2019, Zoom’s annual user conference. All capabilities will be available by the end of January 2020, with many available now.

Zoom’s UC platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices and conference room systems in a single client experience. Zoom is expanding the capabilities of this cloud video PBX platform with new and coming innovations.

Laura Padilla, Zoom‘s head of global business development and channel, tells Channel Partners the innovations “just make our story a lot stronger with partners from a sales perspective, further enhancing our competitive advantage when partners are positioning Zoom with customers.”

Zoom’s Laura Padilla

“You will see with Zoom Rooms specifically and our new hardware partnerships that our partners can now enhance their services offerings and their hardware offerings as well when they sell Zoom Rooms in conjunction with our new hardware partnerships,” she said. “That will allow further expansion in their revenue stream with those hardware partners as well as the services they’re able to deliver in conjunction with Zoom Rooms.”

GTT and Voxbone have joined the Zoom Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) program, which allows Zoom Phone customers to keep their current PSTN service provider. These partners provide new direct on-net brokered SIP peering for Zoom Phone customers.

In addition, Genesys, NICE inContact and Talkdesk have joined the Zoom Contact Center Partner Program. Native integrations allow on-net SIP trunk peering and provide call routing options to cloud contact center platforms. Five9 and Twilio are existing members of this program.

“There will be much more opportunities for partners to provide services around our phone offering as well,” Padilla said. “Because we’re further enhancing our platform and product story, we’re now adding partnerships as a result.”

Since it launched at Zoomtopia 2018, developers have published more than 160 apps to the Zoom App Marketplace. New and coming to Zoom’s portfolio of enterprise integrations and apps are: Zoom for Microsoft —integrations into security-related services such as NICE; and a ServiceNow integration with automatic ticketing and Zoom Chat notification to quickly resolve any issues in Zoom Rooms.

Also at Zoomtopia, Zoom launched three new programs for partners: a reseller partners marketing development funds (MDF) program; an updated certified integrator program; and an updated certified hardware program.

“The MDF program will allow partners to be able to do more marketing and demand-generation programs around Zoom,” Padilla said. “We’re going to further enhance our partner portal with more training and capabilities to our partners for enablement for themselves. We are still in recruitment mode for partners, especially internationally, and so you’ll be hearing a lot more around that as well. And then it’s just an evolution of our overall channel story and ecosystem. As our product is evolving, so will our partner needs and how we further enhance those partnerships and support them.”

Also at Zoomtopia, Poly announced …

… two new purpose-built all-in-one video bars, the Poly Studio X30 and Studio X50. The Studio X Series does not require an external PC or Mac to drive the Zoom Rooms experience, and features new Poly Meeting AI capabilities for audio and video experiences. In addition, Poly announced that the G7500 video operating system also will support the Zoom Rooms experience natively.

“We’re constantly looking at how we can modernize the way people work, and that means making collaboration much simpler — with the software of their choice,” said Joe Burton, Poly‘s president and CEO. “Our completely refreshed line of video devices is designed to drastically streamline that experience of walking into any meeting room and starting a meeting instantly and easily.”

In addition, Jabra announced its Jabra PanaCast, an intelligent panoramic-4K camera, was selected by Zoom as the video solution for its new telepresence capability, Zoom Rooms speaker switching. PanaCast and speaker switching deliver a completely immersive collaboration experience that enables colleagues to connect as though they’re in-person.