Nuvias adds collaboration options with Zoom

Video communications have expanded rapidly in the past few months as workers were forced to stay at home, with usage figures for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Webex all increasing since the start of lockdown in March.

Zoom revealed that in March it was experiencing 200 million daily meetings participants, rising to 300 million in April. Those numbers compare to levels of 10 million daily meetings that the firm was witnessing at the end of 2019. As of 14 June, use of Zoom use grew by 677% compared with its base usage during the week of 17 February, according to the latest instalment of Aternity’s Productivity tracker series.

Increasingly, the expectation is that a significant number of workers will remain remote even after life gets back on a more normal footing, meaning video collaboration tools are likely to remain a product category that should continue to interest the channel.

Zoom has been working hard to cement its position as one of the go-to collaboration tools, adding more encryption and security features in the past few weeks to satisfy the demands of cautious commercial users.

To give it an ongoing opportunity to increase business sales, the firm has signed up Nuvias to make sure it can continue to reach a channel base and get resellers behind its platform.

Ravi Patel, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) channel leader of Zoom, said that it had been attracted to the distributor’s unified communications (UC) expertise: “We’re looking forward to seeing how both companies and our channel partners grow from this partnership.”

Nuvias has been extending the reach of its UC practice and the Zoom signing comes just a month after it added video-conferencing player Pepix into the portfolio.

The channel player will be looking to add to the available options with its latest relationship. The plan is make Zoom Room bundles, including video hardware from Poly, Zoom licenses and white-label installation and support services.

The distributor also has master agent status, which means that its channel partners will be able to sell Zoom licenses as approved agents and can deliver all of the options – phone, meetings, rooms and webinars – to customers.

The Zoom relationship is the first one where a vendor has turned to Nuvias to ask it to act as a master agent band and work with resellers as sub-agents on a referral basis, rather than a direct resale model. The model is one particularly favoured by comms firms and, although established in the US, is still in its infancy in the UK. 

“We’re proud to onboard Zoom within our expanding portfolio. This further endorses our position in enabling the channel to leverage new opportunities across Europe,” said Steve Harris, CEO of Nuvias UC. “Together, we provide the channel with a simple, end-to-end solution they can leverage to support the huge base of end users, optimizing their Zoom experience.”