That is according to Cobweb Managing Director, Michael Frisby, who has told UC Today that collaboration solution providers have an opportunity to extend their existing customer relationships to encompass SaaS solutions, direct routing and cloud hosting services.

“I think a lot of companies have made those early steps into email and productivity solutions,” said Frisby, “but a lot of companies still have on premise servers for running their line of business and finance applications.

We’ve seen businesses struggle to access those on-premises servers, when they’ve been working remotely and they are now deciding to move some of these workloads into SaaS-based solutions, like Xero for finance and HR, as well as moving those on-prem servers into a Microsoft 365-based solution, or if the server needs to stay on premise, an infrastructure as a service solution.

Adding telephony solutions is definitely a trend that we’re seeing, including compliance regulated industries, as companies are laying the foundations for a much more flexible working style, where you have some employees in the office and some at home.”

Frisby’s predictions ring true with analyst house CCS Insight and Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) who both predict that working from home will grow significantly in the near future. According to ETR the percentage of employees permanently working from home is set to double in 2021, rising from 16.4 percent to 34.4 percent.

CCS Insight also forecast a rise in remote workers, predicting over 50 percent of office-based employees will spend the majority of their time at home in 2022 and that a third of large firms will cut spending on office locations by 20 percent on average at their latest predictions event.

Are we seeing a second buying wave?

According to Frisby, Cobweb has seen new annualised revenue surpass £1 million since the beginning of its 2020/21 financial year at the start of May.

The managing director said after seeing growth in March, Cobweb’s new business income tailed off until clients were in a position to think again about their communications and IT infrastructure.

“If I look at our new business intake over the last six months, March was incredibly busy, initially helping people react to the lockdown in the best way possible”

“The next couple of months were quiet but, since August, we have seen people start to come out and make those investment decisions to invest in long term platforms so they can succeed as a business, as people continue to work remotely.”

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3oI0taw