Maintel starts ICON partner recruitment drive

Cloud and managed services specialist Maintel is on the hunt for partners that can take its ICON platform offering to market.

Maintel has built the ICON cloud platform that serves medium and large-sized enterprises with unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) – with Mitel and Avaya the main vendors being offered – plus all of the connectivity, SIP provisioning and mobile with security. The business can also add Cisco’s software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) option into the mix.

With the coronavirus pandemic ongoing, the pressure on customers to increase comms and collaboration has increased, and Maintel has added a package of remote working services along with mobile device and application management and a security-as-a-service solution.

The channel player is looking for partners that want to take ICON and has indicated that it will work with each one to build up a solution stack with the platform as the base that gives them a chance to differentiate from competitors.

Maintel is also promising to take a lot of the pain away for those that do sign up, with its own datacentres, managed by specialist staff 24/7, to agreed service-level applications (SLAs). Those ICON services should help reduce the amount of kit needed by partners.

The idea is not only to recruit partners in the UK, but to open the doors internationally to get interest from a wide spectrum of potential managed service players.

Chris Bain, partner services director at Maintel, said that customers were keen to be presented with an alternative proposition: “At Maintel, we understand that your customers need to see the value from your proposition, not a conduit to a vendor.

“We are looking to work closely with our partners and help them to deliver, ensuring that they can leverage our expertise and solutions to create services that plug gaps in their offerings, differentiate themselves from their competitors and increase share of wallet.

“Potential partners are encouraged to get in touch so that we can start conversations and begin building a truly unique offering,” he said.

The ICON platform has formed the key plank of Maintel’s ongoing transformation efforts along with a decision to shift the business away from low-margin to more valuable contracts.

Ioan MacRae stepped into the CEO role at Maintel late last year, and when speaking to MicroScope in February he underlined the importance of ICON.

“In the past couple of years, the markets moved and you can’t do [the traditional model] any more. It’s become highly competitive, and customers are far more educated and intuitive of what’s out there,” he said.

“Equally, their purchasing decisions have changed, and they want to be able to consume services and products without buying them. Customers want to be able to have the flexibility depending on what happens in their own business – the typical flex-up, flex-down service.

“As a business, we have had to change from very on-premise perpetual, and we are still in that transition into a pure consumption, opex [operational expenditure] and subscription-based offer with services associated with it,” he added.