Matt opened the event with his keynote – highlighting how the business market is looking for a package of integrated offers which are relevant to their business. For most segments, the top issue was security and compliance with integration into the business management system and line of business applications used. Matt’s wider point is that UCaaS/Collab is increasingly becoming part of a wider bundle of services required by businesses – especially in SMB and mid-market. The implication for a Service Provider audience is they either provide the bundle or sell through channels who can aggregate.

Building on the topic of customer centricity, there was a spirited debate about the challenges of rolling out Operator Connect. Personally, I don’t believe there is a demand issue, given that Teams is growing at more than double the market average – so what’s the real problem? Whilst there was various technical hypothesis raised, I firmly believe the channel is not fully bought into selling Teams because they are just not making enough money compared to traditional UCaaS – especially in the SMB where the channel controls the customer journey. Akixi’s CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams product helps partners bridge that revenue gap by adding an extra layer of customer value, driving a higher ARPU, and is designed to ensure the channel can deploy and operate the service as cost efficiently as possible in order to help recover lost margin.

Lots of fantastic AI demos were on display in New York this year. The headline act came courtesy of Microsoft with their Copilot updates being especially powerful. With all the productivity benefits on show, it does raise a host of compliance and user training issues. For example, certain data needs to be restricted with AI – such as salary tables held on SharePoint. This could spur a secondary market in compliance support – ensuring role-based permissions are set-up correctly and managed. Additionally, like many advanced systems, there is a huge gap between AI capability and user ability to extract value. The industry will need to invest heavily in training to ensure the productivity gains are realised…