Zoom's EMEA channel chief affirms 80 per cent indirect sales goal, as vendor hones in on AI, call centre
Dion Smith and Mark Jenkins, Zoom's EMEA and global channel leaders, sat down with CRN this week to discuss the progress the vendor is making in courting the channel
Zoom is looking to aggressively grow its market share and will lean on the channel in a big way over the next five years.
This was one of the key messages at the vendor's Zoomtopia Leaders Connect event in London this week.
Messaging around the vendor's liberal use of AI, particularly the generative kind, across its product roadmap this year and in the coming months, was abundant.
This included features like Zoom AI Companion, AI Expert Assist, Meeting Coach and Zoom Docs. It was clear the vendor has entered the AI race in a big way and has the likes of Microsoft, with its Copilot rollout, in its sights.
But in conversation with its global and EMEA channel chiefs, the picture was more nuanced, emphasising Zoom Phone, call centre-as-a-service (CSaaS) and the Zoom ecosystem as areas of continued focus.
"Over the last 12 months, we've added more points of context than we've ever had before. The phone business is now at seven million seats globally. Contact service 700 (enterprise) customers and growing very rapidly. We've added more points of context in more places. Zoom Docs is another example, Mark Jenkins, head of global strategic alliances, tells CRN.
"And I think we're legitimately at a point where you could really say that we're now almost a complete solution for the entirety of what I would call digitally driven communication."
As it enters the next stage of its post-pandemic growth, the comms vendor is investing heavily in its channel sales. To that end, it brought in Dion Smith (pictured), head of EMEA channels 17 months ago.
More recently, Jenkins' own remit was expanded to also include coverage of the vendor's global channel relationships.
Go-to-market still a core focus
At the time of Smith's hiring, he stated an ambitious goal of bringing Zoom's channel business up to make up 80 per cent of its EMEA revenue by 2025. Fast forward a year and a half, substantial progress has been made, to where that number now sits around 40 per cent.
"When I came in about 17ish months ago, about 14 per cent of our revenues across the EMEA were indirect and. That was really an outcome and we've been very open with this, of a pure direct sales focus for the first 10 years of our company trading. So that 14 per cent was really born out of client demand, versus being deliberate in designing an ecosystem," Smith explains.
"So we were very bold in making some very clear statements to the market that inside four years, we wanted to drive at least 80 per cent of our revenues by the ecosystems across EMEA.
"If we wind the clock forward 17 months, we are sitting now with just over 40 per cent as a whole across EMEA, but many countries have already gone beyond that 80 per cent. If we look in areas such as emerging markets, the Middle East as an example, Turkey, Israel, we're already exceeding that."
According to the channel chief, the reason for this progress is a ground-up rebuild of the vendor's relationships across the channel.
"We've established new distribution partnerships across the NBA. But we've also started to establish some different types of strategic partnerships that give us access to the products that now sit in our platform that we didn't have 18 months ago, when you have a live example. And a local example of that is Talk Talk here in the UK," Smith explains.
"We've launched Zoom phone, we've progressed into the contact centre space, but when we look at partners such as Talk Talk or they have an ecosystem of over 1,000 MSPs, and CSPs purely specialised within those disciplines. So by establishing strategic partnerships, such as Talk Talk here or NUWAVE, Pax8 in the US, it gives us access to those ecosystems to take that to market."
Partner strategy revamp
Part of the work in revamping Zoom's channel strategy will involve a shake up in its partner tiers and adding a more structured set of incentives, the two execs explained.
"We'll be moving to the industry standard of metal levels versus the terminology that we use today. We're talking about our partners being enrolled in sales or performance. So we'll be moving to the silver, gold, platinum terminology, Smith explains.
"Inside that, as I alluded to, we're also going to make it more robust around what is required in order to hit those different gates of a silver or gold or platinum. So again, really demonstrating that if a partner is investing into those capabilities that they will be recognised by the tiering. In turn, as you move up through the tiering, the rewards for the partners increase."
Partners moving towards more managed services will also be recognised as part of the programme revamp, but clarity is still sparse around exactly what this will entail.
"Specific to the services question, we'll also be introducing some new rebates, for partners around services, so where they're delivering services on our behalf, they'll be able to recognise that in a in a better commercial way than they've been able to see that in the past," Smith tells CRN.
The commitments come on the heels of a bumper quarter for the vendor, powered by enterprise accounts.
In its most recent set of results, Zoom delivered five per cent year-on-year revenue increase in its Q3 results to $1.1bn (£880m), driven by a 20 per cent spike in enterprise revenue to $614.3m. Online revenue, meanwhile, reached $487.6m.
The number of customers contributing more than $100,000 in the preceding 12 months saw a jump of 31 per cent year-on-year.