Poly Urges Partners to Prep Customers for New Era of Hybrid Working

Following a new report from Poly, how can the channel capitalize on a “new era of hybrid working”?

The provider of video and voice products and services says the channel should grab the opportunity to help customers adapt to this new hybrid working age.

In a report released Wednesday, the vendor points to a shift from “place” to “purpose” of work as businesses respond to COVID-19. As such, they are redesigning their operations and reinventing the way they work.

The report indicates that traditional offices will become a thing of the past, replaced by a hybrid working approach. Alongside home working, organizations will invest in co-working spaces on the outskirts of expensive cities to attract talent. There will also be greater emphasis on group collaboration and social connections with colleagues and others.

Carl Wiese, Poly’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer, said partners should ensure they set customers up with enterprise-grade solutions for the new environment.

Poly’s Carl Wiese

“The first 30 days of COVID-19, people bought whatever they could get. If the headset was good and the video camera, they didn’t care,” he said. “Now they realize this is a long-term change and they need to upgrade and have enterprise-grade things in the home.”

Wiese said it’s not just the equipment on which partners should focus, but “support from an IT management perspective.”

He also said firms will be upgrading their conference facilities.

“When they return to the office, they’re going to have to enable those at scale. Because to go to a conference room and not have video is going to be a foreign concept. Our partners will be very much in the middle of helping them to design and implement those.”

Zoom and Teams

In addition, he said there will be greater opportunity for partners around cloud-based videoconferencing technologies like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Earlier this month, Poly announced a partnership with Zoom to offer various hardware-as-a-service bundles to users.

Plantronics acquired Polycom in 2018 and the company then rebranded as Poly. The vendor announced a new partner program in April that merged both programs under one umbrella for its 15,000 partners.

Wiese said given an acceleration to cloud, the company is considering adding a new managed service provider (MSP) category to the program.