In the City of Brotherly Love, CoreDial CEO Alan Rihm made his feelings clear to the roughly 620 channel partners the company works with.
“I want you to get your unfair share of the market,” said Rihm in his opening remarks at the company’s second annual PartnerConnex event, a sentiment he continued to repeat throughout the conference.
How big is that market? By 2021, analysts estimate up to $43 billion dollars will be spent on end user unified communications (UC). Only 20 percent of the small to medium-sized business market is currently using cloud-based voice communications, with that percentage expected to more than double by 2020.
No matter how you slice it, there’s big potential for growth. CoreDial started out in 2005 with a mixture of direct and channel sales, but went with an all channel strategy and has never looked back. The company’s overall growth rate “pivoted up” said Rihm, boosted by not being in competition with partners.
“We aren’t disintermediating our partners from their customers,” Rihm said.
CoreDial instead built up its backend platform, automating the ability to deliver cloud services, followed by a technology investment over the past two years to bring its communications features on par with the rest of the industry.
The strategy is paying measurable dividends, with a 30 percent seat growth rate year over year and a 50 percent channel growth rate last year. CoreDial has over 250,000 seats, over 20,000 end-user customers and over 620 channel partners to date. It is adding seats at a rate of over 4,500 per month.
Rihm and other CoreDial executives discussed how the company plans to continue to support its partners with new services, features and products added to the existing portfolio. One of the major adds is Broadsoft, joining Asterisk (News - Alert) in CoreDial’s lineup. Broadworks has a combination of features and attributes making it ideal for serving mid-market enterprise customers between 250 to 1000 users.
CoreDial is encouraging partners to move upmarket, since a SME customer will have more seats and buy more value-added service – hence, generating more revenue –than a small business customer purchasing anywhere from five to 20 seats, but the company isn’t forcing the issue.
“It depends on where they are, who they are focusing on,” Rihm said. “Some have 500 seat, 250 seat deals ready to go. Some are doing this from a lifestyle perspective, others want multimillion dollar growth, others just want to support customers in a 50 to 100 mile radius. We’ll support anyone in that range.”
Depending on the service type, a CoreDial partner may receive between 50 to 65 percent gross margins, but “we don’t lead with price,” said Rihm. “We are more about the platform and business module, removing frictions.”
Among the takeaways you get from CoreDial’s PartnerConnex is process. The company has procedures for finding highly qualified partner leads, a program to recruit them, another program to bring partners onboard and get them running effectively with the CoreDial services, and other ongoing programs to work with partners to help them sell and grow, with six different “partner success” levels based upon revenues generated. You can think of CoreDial as a helpful machine designed to maximize growth and partner success through disciplined methodology, rather than dependent on a simplistic model of simply adding partners to boost bragging rights.
R&D is the other takeaway. CoreDial is steadily investing in product development, including moving into areas few UC services are talking about. When voice-to-text is rolled out, it will not only support call recording but call redaction, a feature it has been testing with Google (News - Alert). Call redaction is designed for use in regulated industries, such as financial and healthcare, removing sensitive customer data such as credit card and social security information while enabling the use of other information captured in call center interactions and other dialogs.
Other tech improvements include analytics and lots of APIs. Partners will be able to gain the benefits of anonymized summary data from the CoreDial partner base, using the information to better target their own sales efforts as well as to gain insights from their specific customer sets. APIs will enable partners to tailor CoreData services to specific customers and integrate them into tailored product offerings.
While “Get your unfair share of the market” may sound like first order hype, CoreDial is certainly prepared to match its words with deeds as it continues to add partners and customers judging from the news delivered at its partner event this week.