Avant to Agents: $5 Million MRR Deal Imminent
Agents and vendors both say deals are getting bigger.
![Avant to Agents: $5 Million MRR Deal Imminent Avant to Agents: $5 Million MRR Deal Imminent](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltaf6ef2677c802d5d/652443a72014a2446b07ded3/IMG_1154-1.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Attendees went through screening before they registered to ensure healthy and safety. Vaccinated individuals used a QR code to submit their COVID-19 immunization record.
Non-vaccinated people could either test negative for COVID-19 in the days leading up to the show or take an on-site rapid test (right).
A packed crowd showed up for the Women in Tech event. Vernice “Flygirl” Armour wowed the audience with her stories of flying a AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter in the U.S. Marines. She served two tours in Iraq and earned the honor of America’s first African American female combat pilot.
Armour joined a panel of rock star women following her keynote: Kelli McMillan (center), global partner manager at Five9 and founder of Xposure IDC, Jennifer Gallego, Avant’s executive vice president of global sales and Shannon Orr, Avant’s senior channel manager.
Orr noted that half of Avant’s employees are women.
“It is unheard of [in the industry], but that’s why we’re here. To say, ‘It is possible,'” Orr said.
Gallego said being majority-women wasn’t an initial goal of Avant’s.
“I think it’s more about the culture that we’ve built. We wanted to build a cool place where people could come and work hard and play hard, and create an environment that was inviting,” Gallego said.
McMillan expressed the excitement that many people have been feeling about attending in-person events.
“For the last 18 months we’ve been talking to each other over different collaborative resources. But this is an opportunity to touch each other and reach out to someone you’ve looked at on LinkedIn for the last 18 months and really connect with them,” McMillan said, to find a mentor or create a partnership that’s going to elevate your customers’ technologies as they continue to move through this environment.”
Attendees ventured outside for an opening reception Monday night. They snacked on tacos and enjoyed an open bar.
Avant hosted the conference and its various events at the Fairmont Hotel in Austin, Texas.
Another big audience gathered on Tuesday morning for Avant president Drew Lydecker’s keynote.
Lydecker opened his keynote with observations of how quickly data is moving today. For example, Japan broke the world record for internet speed at 317 terabits per second.
Lydecker said speed is our new currency. And data is the new oil.
“Everything around us is getting faster, and speed is critical,” he said. “We’re going to deliver the speed together.”
Avant coined a new phrase that Lydecker hyped up during his keynote: evolocity. It’s the combination of “evolution” and velocity.”
“We have to evolve or we die. That’s a fact. And it’s going to take speed,” Lydecker said.
Dialpad CEO Craig Walker joined Lydecker on stage. Walker, who founded Google Voice, said the channel accounted for more than half of Dialpad’s deals last quarter.
He also put a little bit of shade on Zoom’s pending multibillion acquisition of Five9. For one, he described Five9 as monolithic in its architecture, due to it being a 20-year-old company.
“And then you take Zoom, which is a bunch of different micrososervices, and you’re trying to merge a marble statue with a bunch of Legos,” he said.
Scott Kinka, chief strategy and innovation officer at Evolve IP, fielded questions from Avant CEO Ian Kieninger.
Kieninger asked Kinka what partners should make of Microsoft. Evolve IP, which partners with Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, offers direct routing for Teams. However, Kinka and Kieninger both said that certain channel partners view Microsoft with hesitation.
“The Teams opportunity is an interesting one because it certainly comes to you like a threat,” Kinka said. “What I generally say to partners who ask me that question is this: Microsoft does not do hand-to-hand combat. That’s what we do everyday. We know the prospects, we understand their needs, we do the heavy lifting and we get the install work done. They built a platform for people to consume.”
Kinka cited Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently said that partners making nine dollars for every dollar Microsoft earns.
“That’s an opportunity that I think this community largely is not been participating in, and we want to help bridge that gap,” Kinka said.
Vonage CEO Rory Read made a bold move by sharing his phone number with the entire Special Forces Summit. His phone was buzzing with texts from partners as he chatted with Lydecker.
“Leveraging the channel is the key to unlocking our future at Vonage,” Read said.
A whizbang assemblage of cloud communication vendors joined Lydecker for a panel.
Lydecker echoed Kinka’s comments about Microsoft Teams, encouraging partners to look for opportunities with vendors that have done integrations with Microsoft.
“We’ve talked about how Microsoft to a degree can be the enemy. But we’re running right at it,” Lydecker said. “And when you think about Teams, you need to run right at it.”
Jenn Gallego moderated a panel of WAN and connectivity providers.
An interesting comment came from Chris Jones, who manages service distributor (master agent) relationships within AT&T‘s Alliance Channel and ACC Business programs. Jones said AT&T pivoted in its approach to the channel a few years ago. That came after he said AT&T asked for partner feedback. Jones said AT&T had to come to the realization that it needed to do business with partners in the way partners wanted to do business. And that required humility, he said.
“We’ve understood that we were our biggest problem. If we were going to change that, we had to earn our way back to the channel.”
Brad Dupee, head of channel development at Granite Telecommunications, explained his company’s recent acquisition of Epik. Granite specializes in WAN aggregation, but it turned to Epik to help customers with POTS replacement.
“The carriers are pushing hard to get rid of that old network. We still have Alexander Graham Bell on speed dial,” Dupee said.
Kevin Thomsen, who leads Zoom‘s channel routes to market, said the channel accounted for 20% of the 500,000 net new Zoom Phone seats added in the last quarter.
Thomsen assured partners that Zoom is investing more in its program and tightening up its engagement policies.
“We’re going on offense. Before it was chaos. We had 3,000 partners sign up in two weeks [in 2020]. We went from 10 million users to 300,000,000 daily users,” Thomsen said. “Now that we’ve scaled appropriately, we have a hyper focus on you the partner.”
Craig Schlagbaum, Comcast Business‘ senior vice president and channel chief, said he has seen partners in the room move up from $20,000-30,000 MRR deals to $1 million. He cited changes at Avant that helped enable those deals, as well as changes at Comcast Business. Schlagbaum pointed to increasing channel integration at his company when it comes to the enterprise.
“We’ll team with you on those deals, and we’ll work with you all day long. That’s not something we used to do,” Schlagbaum said. “There has been ‘evolocity,’ and the channel’s changing, getting into much bigger accounts and larger opportunities.”
The morning keynote closed with a keynote from professional speaker Kevin Brown, who talked about how the human need for validation plays into the sales process.
Avant honored top agents, VARs and suppliers Tuesday evening.
Opex Technologies (right) took home top overall trusted advisory, in addition to landing the largest CCaaS and security deals.
Partners and suppliers went to separate dinner locations based on their geography. The central folks, pictured above, dined at the Eberly.
Partners and suppliers went to separate dinner locations based on their geography. The central folks, pictured above, dined at the Eberly.
AVANT SPECIAL FORCES SUMMIT — A partner will land a $5 million monthly recurring revenue deal soon. Drew Lydecker can feel it in the air.
Avant‘s president laid out a number of bold predictions at the Avant Special Forces Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday. Speaking to a crowd of VARs, agents, suppliers and everything in between, Lydecker praised the channel for how it helped businesses move through COVID-19. Specifically, the channel helped “make the world smaller” with web conferencing.
Avant Communications’ Drew Lydecker
“Our providers helped enable communications across the globe,” Lydecker said. “This cemented our future forever.”
In addition to his $5 million prediction, Lydecker forecast that the average trusted adviser (agent) will earn $100,000 per month.
Phil Hugus works for network sourcing firm ISG. Hugus said many partner firms are already tipping the scales of $1 million MRR, and he said $5 million is quite possible.
ISG’s Phil Hugus
“$5 million MRR is going to turn into a $60 million per year network spend. Those customers are out there,” he said. “We have some clients that are nine-figure yearly network spends. The challenge is getting one of those big spends to recognize that there’s a better solution from a channel partner than with the traditional embedded carrier strategy they’ve been doing for 100 years.”
Hugus said a partner might also accomplish the feat by cross-selling different technologies.
“It’s 20,000 seats of CCaaS, a big security platform and 10,000 seats of UCaaS. And you pile them on,” he said.
Lydecker also predicted that security will become a top three technology for partners to sell in the upcoming year.
To see what else Lydecker and his colleagues in the channel said during the first two days of the summit, scroll through the slideshow above.
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