BayCom, Enghouse win Ultrafast Fibre deal

At a time when many resellers are moving to having multi-vendor, diverse portfolios, a move to specialise has proven a winning formula for Kiwi tech provider BayCom Communications – and has won it a thumbs up from Enghouse Interactive.

The reseller and integrator, which has offices in Auckland and Tauranga, was instrumental in a new five-year deal which sees BayCom and Enghouse Interactive providing a full suite of communications solutions to Ultrafast Fibre.

The solution includes Enghouse Interactive Communications Centre (EICC) as the multi-channel contact centre platform, complete with email queuing, call back and Touchpoint desktop.

BayCom is also implementing NEC's Univerge IP telephony solution with full redundancy and will provide first and second level support and professional services work.

While phase one of the deal covers 30 contact centre agents for voice and email, with a real-time reporting engine and call recording, that is expected to double over the coming six to nine months.

Dean Hodgson, Enghouse Interactive Asia Pacific managing director, says the deal was lead by BayCom, which he says is one of Enghouse's fastest growing partners in New Zealand.

"They have grown seven-fold over the last financial year," Hodgson says.

"They're quite unique in that they have a very narrow focussed. Some resellers are very much multivendor and try to be all things to all people. And that's absolutely fine. But it does present some challenges for an integrator sometimes in having to have multiple resources across a broad range of products and maintaining that level of expertise across multiple products can be a challenge.

Hodgson says BayCom has taken the opposite tack, going instead for a narrow, highly specialised, focus which includes the NEC platform for telephony and unified communications and Enghouse Interactive for contact centre.

"They came to us wanting to gain the expertise and be self-sufficient and asking for us to train them," Hodgson says.

"It was very refreshing.

"It's very much around what we're doing with our channel program, in wanting our partners to have that expertise and self sufficiency, so we're putting a lot of time and effort into our partners with enablement around implementation and support capabilities.

"BayCom is a great example of this, and this was very much a partner lead sale where we were brought in at the later stages of the sales cycle as the domain expert and to show we were the vendor alongside the partner.

Hodgson says BayCom's level of focus around specific solutions has been critical in its success, enabling BayCom to represent itself as 'the absolute expert' in the areas it specialises in.

"From a vendor perspective, having a partner that has that level of capability and enablement, who is out there representing us in the marketplace – those are the type of partners we really like," he says.

"And we're working really hard across our entire channel to introduce that same level of enablement and self-sufficiency.

Hodgson says Ultrafast Fibre – a fast growing company building a 3000km fibre network across the North Island – found their existing contact centre infrastructure was unable to meet call volumes from prospective and existing customers.

"They were at a point where they needed to do something very fast.

'Very fast' translated into an eight-week deployment time, from signing to go live.

The fibre provider is also expecting to double its business in the next 12 months, making scalability a crucial driver.

A flexible support arrangement is included in the deal to enable for future expansion of Ultrafast Fibre's call centre hours – which the company expects will go from standard business hours to 24/7 over the next year.

"We were able to deliver to an enterprise grade mission critical contact centre environment and we've done that very much in a joint selling arrangement with BayCom which has been bought about through the investment we've made in our training and certification and the channel enablement over the last 12 months," Hodgson says.