Confronting Covid-19: How Partners Made Zoom, Microsoft Teams And Cisco Webex Essential Viewing

When the largest hospital system at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in New York City needed to broadcast calls from its CEO to 20,000 physicians, nurses and staff for daily pandemic updates, solution provider Clover Communications recommended Zoom Video Communications.

“[On a] Thursday night, the hospital called us with the request. We looked at four or five other options, but Zoom was the only one that could get 20,000 seats up by Monday morning,” said Dominick Callandriello, president and CEO of Clover, a Morristown, N.J.-based Zoom partner. “These were calls where they were announcing the number of deaths, having moments of silence, and sharing the number of cases. Without this kind of tool, I don’t know how the CEO would have had an opportunity to drive his people to move forward.”

The rise of the global coronavirus pandemic has created unparalleled opportunities for solution providers to drive sales of collaboration and Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex while wrapping in additional services. In particular, videoconferencing as a service became ubiquitous as people across the U.S. rearchitected their lives to work, learn and receive health care from home.

Security is “a great use case where we see an ability to generate revenue from Teams,” said Matt Dierolf, enterprise architect at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Anexinet, No. 212 on the 2020 CRN Solution Provider 500. For Anexinet, revenue opportunities have included consulting services to implement Teams security for customers, as well as recurring revenue from managed services to stay on top of security controls, he said.

Read the full article at CRN.com