Tic-Tac-Toe, Where Is Your Next ‘X’ Going To Go?

This week Amazon and Slack announced a partnership where Slack will provide voice and video infrastructure for Amazon Chime. This will move their offer forward to provide a full collaboration suite.

Why does that matter? You might be aware Microsoft Teams already offers a full collaboration suite with over 80+ million active daily users. Now #Amazon+Slack are seriously entering this arena to play.

This matters because these industry leaders will drive businesses and consumers towards viewing voice as a commodity feature of collaboration vs. a stand-alone entity. They know how to take the complex and bring to the masses easily and cheaply (think of all those boxes on your doorstep).

For old telco, if your customer now has voice capabilities in one of these platforms, the value, usage and need for traditional black phones on a desk hooked to a PBX or a cloud PBX in a proprietary solution are greatly reduced.

If you can’t offer out-of-the-box, flexible and nimble voice services without professional services engagements, out-dated trunking models and secure, global data centers around the world in days or minutes; you’ll lose in the new game.

To quote from this Geekwire article “This pandemic is showing us that more than email, and potentially more than channel-based communication, calling is the piece of technology that organizations need the most in a distributed workforce”.

If you are still selling siloed telco solutions, it’s time to rethink your strategy on how to win because your ‘X’s are going to be blocked. Conversely, if you are supporting Teams, you might have 2 ‘X”s but you still need to secure the voice space to win.

The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner.