Dive Brief:
- Google Cloud partnered with software vendor Ujet and services distributor Avant Communications to deliver a cloud contact center service offering built for technology advisors last month.
- The route to market gives midmarket customers access to Google Cloud CCaaS and Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX) without broader cloud spending commitment. Ujet, a strategic partner of Google Cloud and one of its portfolio companies, will provides customer support and pays residual commissions to Avant TA partners that sell the platform.
- The move was a first, according to Avant Head of AI/CX Andrew Pryfogle. “None of the hyperscalers have ever been in this channel in a real way," he said. "In fact, we’ve almost trained the trusted advisor community to sell against them,” Avant Head of AI/CX Andrew Pryfogle told Channel Dive.
Dive Insight:
In an age when Google Cloud and other hyperscalers are pushing services, a TSD partnership flips the script.
TAs and the TSDs that power them are sellers at their core, and vendors pay them for sales in their agency model. Though hyperscalers are shelling out major money to partners — Google Cloud recently announced a $750 million AI fund — Ujet CEO Vasili Triant said they are typically incentivizing services rather than sales.
“They have these little programs: 'If you bring and sell this deal, we'll give you a birthday cupcake, or we'll give you a little tinker toy prize,' but it doesn't reward any recurring revenue,” Triant said. “And everybody in the world knows the value's in the recurring revenue.”
Triant has been pitching the TA model to Google Cloud channel leaders for the better part of three years, urging them to rebalance their funding to put a little bit more into sales as opposed to just services.
“It would have such a massive reverberation through the broader ecosystem that literally, you would be taking extremely large companies —let's just say they might start with an A or a D or an M on the services side — and completely upend the business model,” Triant said.
It was too much change for Google Cloud to introduce on its own. As a result, Ujet, which has long sold through TAs, took it upon itself to bridge the gap. A significant part of that is Ujet handling customer tickets. In return, Google Cloud is waiving GCP commits for clients that purchase Google Cloud CCaaS by Ujet.
Ujet decided to partner with a single, CX-focused TSD to distribute the platform rather than push the product to the whole market, Triant said.
“If we really want to bring this to market, we can't just slough it off and commoditize it to everybody,” Triant said. “We really need to find a partner who also believes this is of value to the agents and bring it to market with them.”
TAs prefer to go to market with multiple suppliers in their line card, rather than focus on a single vendor. Google Cloud’s offering was a glaring gap in the line card.
“Google has a fantastic offering around Contact Center AI (CCAI). They have long integrated with leading CRM systems and have shown their technology in search and retrieval as industry leading,” Rise Technology Advisors Co-founder Eric Ludwig told Channel Dive in an email.
“This addition to the portfolio allows partners to help clients understand how to leverage their investments holistically, bringing best of breed technology together.”
TSDs and TAs hope additional large OEMs will enter the market. ISVs and service providers like Ujet may be key intermediaries.
Salesforce is the obvious next candidate — and the obvious holdout. Salesforce recently entered the CX market by fully integrating CRM and CCaaS capabilities, and in doing so started competing against its own ISV partners. Salesforce’s ISV partners, such as Nice, Genesys and even Ujet, use the agent model to scale their sales, but Salesforce does not.
“I would love for Salesforce to wake up to the same thing, but they've never, never done that in the life of their company,” Pryfogle said. “Their entire partner opportunity’s through services. That's it. They share nothing in the licensing and consumption.”
It’s an advantage for those firms in the midmarket and increasingly companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
“The trusted advisor community, by public records, accounts for well over half the growth of all the major CCaaS players out there, and that's increasing year over year,” Pryfogle said.
