Intermedia COO On Kicking Off ‘Record Year’ In Sales And The Massive Microsoft Teams Opportunity For Partners
"As much as I love our complete standalone UCaaS application and what we use as a business, I would tell people: 'If you're already standardized on Teams, just plug ours in there.’ It's the way to go. I wouldn't try to sell them off of it. There’s a lot of other advantages to the Microsoft ecosystem," COO Jonathan McCormick tells CRN of the opportunity that partners have in integrating Intermedia's voice offering directly into Teams for a unified collaboration experience for businesses.
Intermedia sees 2025 as a repeat of last year in the best possible way, according to company COO Jonathan McCormick.
"It’s going to be another record year for us in sales for our UCaaS product set," McCormick told CRN enthusiastically in a recent interview.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based business communications provider spent 2024 making moves. First, with its service provider initiative in which the company experienced a surge in new service provider partnerships at a time in which the soft switch era was coming to an end. It triggered a wave of service providers using legacy systems, such as Cisco/BroadSoft and Microsoft/Metaswitch who were searching for modern communications systems and finding it in Intermedia. Next, the company toward the end of the year entered into a definitive agreement with longtime partner NEC to assume NEC’s unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) business in North America and later, NEC’s partner relationships in Europe. That deal alone prompted a 25 percent increase in sales. Last up, Intermedia launched a new way to embed its advanced voice capabilities directly into Microsoft Teams, which is already enhancing deal sizes for partners and helping these solution providers target larger customers.
Intermedia bounded into 2025 with a lot of momentum, which is only set to continue as the company aggressively pursues the Microsoft Teams opportunity with its partners. The company is also keeping a close eye on AI to stay at the forefront of interesting use cases it can bring to end customers through its partners as they help businesses modernize their communications.
Here are excerpts from CRN’s recent conversation with McCormick.
What is the big opportunity you’re going after with partners in 2025?
The more product-related thing that we did recently that I’m quite excited about, is we released a new Intermedia Unite for Microsoft Teams -- Intermedia Unite for Teams Advanced. This is our voice application fully embedded inside of Teams so that the user can really live in a single application in the Teams app. [Many] businesses are standardized on Teams for chat, video conferencing and application sharing and document sharing, but they haven't standardized what to do around voice. They can take our business voice -- and we took our all the best capabilities of our business voice, things like SMS, company messaging, Contact Center, UC archive, and all the things that have been part of that whole product suite and we put it all into a newly developed app that's embedded inside of Teams -- and you get this single user experience, but with a truly differentiated voice capability that you can't get through Teams today. The only other [vendor] to embedded anything in Teams fully [was] at the time, RingCentral, but they didn't do it the way we did it and they don't have a lot of the other capabilities I mentioned in contact center, SMS [and] archive. So, I truly believe it's the best one out on the market. We've seen incredible opportunities [and] It's increasing our deal size significantly, because that's a lot of the bigger deals that are looking for that.
A [recent] Microsoft blog post that blew my mind said they have 320 million Teams users worldwide, but only 6 percent of Teams users have voice-enabled themselves using like the Microsoft PBX. So, the way I say it is the opposite when I talk to my sales team or partners. "Hey, 94 out of 100 businesses you're talking to that are using Teams as their company collaboration product are not voice-enabled using the Microsoft PBX, which means you have an incredible opportunity to take whatever they're using for voice today -- because it's not the Microsoft PBX, it could be some separate provider -- and offer them this single user experience with all of our capabilities." We're super excited about that one because it's a huge opportunity out there and I think we position ourselves at this point in time better than any of the other pure play UCaaS providers to take advantage of it.
Are Intermedia partners already getting in on the Teams opportunity?
Absolutely, because I think everybody knows how many businesses are standardized on Teams. I think there's an assumption for what that means for how many are using Teams voice, and we've been out there selling against that piece of it. We're longtime Microsoft partners too, so we sell a lot of Microsoft 365 [and] a lot of hosted exchange, but we've been out there selling against that component, which is what we think is a much better business voice system. As I said, they don't have contact center, they don't have SMS, they don't really have UC archive. So, it's not just marketing [from us], it's truly a differentiated system that we can point out all the things you'll need. I think just with some of these recent stats that came out, I do see those as providing confidence to people that this is the right strategic direction and businesses are still looking for this. And honestly, as much as I love our complete standalone UCaaS application and what we use as a business, I would tell people: "If you're already standardized on Teams, just plug ours in there." It's the way to go. I wouldn't try to sell them off of it. There's a lot of other advantages to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you standardize on Teams, I get it. But voice [and] contact center is not a strength of theirs.
I honestly would have said if you asked this a while ago that Teams was a big challenge. But then this is something that we've unlocked for [partners] that was keeping some of the bigger customer base there. So, so that definitely would have been one.
I don't know if I would call it a challenge, as much as it's [about] how we properly navigate the landscape and end up at the right point, but AI, and everything that's going on with AI these days. It's all over the place and it's kind of an explosion right now -- it sort of reminds me of the .com days. There's AI popping up everywhere, but it's going to end up shrinking back over the next couple years into a core set of technology capabilities and providers, so just helping to navigate that that right with [partners] and give them good, practical AI use cases that are winning, I think is important. It's a little bit further down the road; we're starting to see it be more important at the point of the deal, really having those capabilities. But also, I think in general, people just want to know that you're investing in it and that you're going to grow with it as things grow and evolve and change. Strangely enough, a lot of end customers of partners I talk to [and] some of them think it's not really real yet. So, we're [saying:] "No, no, there's some very practical applications in AI today, like summarization of a call." If after every call in a contact center, you have to take three minutes to summarize the notes, that turns your 17-minute call to a 20-minute call, but if you can click a button and it summarizes the notes you get back that three minutes, as an example. So, there's some really practical stuff and we're starting to educate people more on those types of things.
It's a mix of both. What we're building is not the core of the AI. That's going to be the Googles, the Microsofts, the Amazons, and that's who we're partnering with and we use many different ones, but what we're building is the platform. The platform for our product that puts the right walls and boundaries up, making sure [AI] doesn't run wild and it's well-protected, and then we're doing the integration for the different use cases, the reporting, the visualizations in the application. That's where we're doing the work.
I hesitate to say this because I think [partners] already know it, but things haven't really changed around the high-level positioning of our strategy, which is, there's still hundreds of millions of premise-based systems that are moving to the cloud and that's the real opportunity. Things like AI or what we've done around the Teams capability, those are just things that that that help support the necessity to make this move even more. You talk to a small, 25-person business on a PBX that does business with customers and they haven't even SMS-enabled their business, it's like, wow. Or, you get the big organization that isn't really using contact center integrated into a healthcare platform where they're doing things like auto bill pay or appointment reminders, all those types of capabilities are still driving people from the prem to the cloud, and AI a big part of all of that. I tell people that the amount of ways you can apply AI to the core communication systems, both internal and external, to improve efficiency, customer experience, productivity, revenue, is kind of endless, but you have to get to the cloud to take advantage of all that. So, it's just the same journey we started and the opportunity is still huge, and I think these partners all know that, but at least our partner channel sits on the majority of this base still. So, we're really working more closely with our partners to make sure that our product roadmap aligns with the opportunity they see in the customer base, to get them to move to cloud and make sure that it's an upgrade from where they are and benefits their business as they modernize their business communications.
