The hosted service now includes virtual meeting room and video conferencing services and is now available to channel partners throughout North America, Europe and other key markets. While the CounterPath Stretto Collaboration solution initially targeted large Enterprises with a premises-based offering, the new, hosted Software as a Solution (SaaS) offering provides improved scalability to address the vastly underserved SMB market.
While nearly three-quarters, or 72.5%, of businesses with 100 – 999 employees use VoIP according to IDC, only 36% utilise UCC. Key reasons for this discrepancy include high operating costs and lack of integration with existing systems. CounterPath has addressed these gaps with a cost-effective and scalable hosted offering that also includes APIs to allow customers to quickly integrate CounterPath services with SMB business systems.
According to a report by Component, the global enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow from USD 34.57 Billion in 2018 to USD 59.86 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 11.6% from 2018 to 2023. The report continues to say that the SME (SMB) market is mostly adopting cloud-based solutions to avoid hardware, software, and deployment costs.
"We see a significant opportunity in the SMB market for UCC," said Todd Carothers, EVP of Sales, Marketing, and Product at CounterPath. "We have sold UCC via our direct sales team but wanted to ratchet up our offering for the channel. We took the time to listen to our channel partners and their customers to develop a scalable solution that offers a compelling UCC feature set, completely managed in the cloud. The early success of our channel partners has proven we have the right solution that meets these challenging requirements. We have selected partner .e4 Strategies for our initial North American rollout because of their technical depth and customer reach."
"CounterPath has been our softphone unified communications partner for over five years," said Michael White, Principal at .e4 Strategies. “They have extended their solution to include not only centralised provisioning and user management, but also secure messaging, presence and now collaboration. They are a perfect fit for our open source-based PBX customers looking to add unified communications and collaboration to their offering seamlessly."