As North America’s largest value-added resellers added broker models, Trust Technology Consultants couldn’t kill its resale business fast enough.
Last year, the Louisiana-based firm stopped collecting hardware inventory, ended maintenance contracts and said goodbye to its last technician. The company turned to the capital-light technology advisor model, reversing course on a two-decade legacy of reselling unified communications equipment.
“The juice is not worth the squeeze,” TTC Co-owner Mack Slaughter told Channel Dive.
TTC’s trajectory counters convergence among the larger VARs, which are mixing resale, brokerage and managed services. As resale increasingly favors scale and on-premise UC vendors stumble, some smaller firms are pivoting to an agency model.
“Part of the biggest problem was just finding technicians and keeping technicians. And then the suppliers were not making it easy,” Slaughter said, referring to Avaya’s ongoing challenges bringing a cloud product to market and Panasonic’s exit from the UC market.
Slaughter was installing phone systems as a tech when he joined TTC — then Allegiance — in 2013. When he moved into sales two years later, he learned about the nascent technology advisor and attended an Intelisys Super9 event about the unified-communications-as-a-service business.
Intelisys, a technology services distributor, was starting a push into UCaaS, and partners were taking note. They could also use TSDs to sell carrier services, managed IT services and, eventually, cybersecurity.
“I'm like, ‘What the heck is any of this?’ That was where the seed was planted. You sell it, the vendors pay you, and it's not your responsibility,” Slaughter said.
Allegiance’s foray into brokerage was incremental. Slaughter championed the model as an individual contributor, but when his sales exploded, he earned a promotion to director of network services with the goal of expanding the TA business. In August 2020, Slaughter and Spencer Taylor bought the business, renamed it and trained their sights on the agency.
Slaughter said, “In five years, we may look up and say, 'We don't have techs; we have project managers. We don't have an office; we're fully virtual.’”
COVID had already dealt a blow to on-premises communications hardware. TTC tried to keep selling hardware for a time, but Panasonic was already out of the game and Avaya was going all in on a RingCentral-powered Avaya Cloud Office offering that Slaughter didn’t believe in.
After partnering with RingCentral in 2019 to white-label its cloud offering, Avaya shut down contracts for its previous cloud-based offering that TTC and other partners had been selling. That pulled the rug out from some clients' feet, Slaughter said.
“Avaya was pushing Avaya Cloud Office so hard down our throats that they started tying our hardware discounts for premise systems to how many ACO deals we were doing,’” he said.
The company continued to support hardware, which became difficult, as maintenance contracts required technicians. When their last legacy phone technician said he had a new job lined up, Slaughter and Taylor exited the hardware business, outsourcing Avaya maintenance to Aura, a company in the TSD line card.
Convergence vs. partnership
TTC’s agency journey is not yet complete. The company continues to sell hardware outside of UC, including paging equipment and ceiling grid speakers, which have no parallel in the TSD portfolio.
Reselling goes through a traditional IT distributor. But Slaughter sees a way out — a referral partnership.
The person who ran the cabling division at Allegiance bought his own portion of the company. The new firm, Cyberwire, and TTC send business to each other. TTC hands off clients for cabling services, and Cyberwire hands off clients that need UC and telecom. Slaughter thinks his referral partner could start reselling the hardware he doesn’t want to sell. In a world where the largest partners are trying to be all things to the customer, Slaughter’s thesis is that partners can work together.
“I'm like, ‘You need to hurry up and sign up with Jenne so that you can sell this and pay me a finder's fee.’ I want to be out of the middle,” he said.
