Unified Comms specialist Unify has reiterated previously announced plans to aggressively target channel growth with 50% of the sales going through partners.
The company, which is now the Atos brand for communications and collaboration software, said during its annual global partner conference held this week in Barcelona that it is on track to deliver its commitments to focus on the channel partners.
During the past 12 months Unify managed to increase the number of its partners to over 2,000 in 50 countries, doubling in size, and signed an additional 13 new distributors, it says. All the partners joined under the company’s programme which is designed to differentiate the partners and reward them respectively to the investments they made in developing the expertise, it says.
This helped to drive the number of partners who have completed certifications on the Unify’s portfolio by almost 30% with another 370 partners being certified to sell Circuit to the customers, it says.
In 2014, Unify first announced that it was revamping its business model to give priority to the channel and partners and focused on simplifying its portfolio, new partner programme and ‘channel-focused’ management team, the company says. To this end it hired Jon Pritchard as its channel head; he has recently been promoted to the CEO. Unify says it wants to become the partner of choice for the communications and collaboration industry and will soon announce additional enhancements to a partner programme which would include new tools.
“Two years ago we put the industry on notice that we intended to be the partner of choice for the communications and collaborations industry. Today I can say that we have built the world-class programme with the best partners in the space, so we are well on our way to achieving that goal. With our partners this week in Barcelona, we will share more about how we continue our business to drive greater business to our partners, and work with them to explore further improvements we can make to fulfil our mutual growth aspirations,” says Jon Pritchard.