Over 80 Percent Of New Business At Intermedia Is Coming From Partners

Unified-Communications-as-a-Service powerhouse Intermedia is betting heavily on the channel with more than 80 percent of the company’s new business coming from partners this year.

Intermedia, which received a 5-star rating in CRN's 2018 Partner Program Guide, differentiates itself in the UCaaS market by giving high margins to its channel partners with a major focus on simplicity, according to Intermedia Chief Revenue Officer Eric Martorano.

"One of the things partners are always looking for is it's not only necessarily the margins you make, but it's the margins you keep," said Martorano in an interview with CRN at XChange 2018. "So we're always continuing to invest in the channel community to make sure that they get to keep as many dollars they earn as possible, and I don’t think many of our competitors can say that."

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The Mountain View, Calif.-base UCaaS specialist invests dollars in making things more simple from both a product and channel sales perspective.

"We try to do all we can to make sure there's an easy partnership with the partner community, but as well as doing business with the SMB," said Martorano. "The way the products are designed and the way we deploy the products -- and how our partner community is engaged with the SMB customer – we try to make the entire life cycle of that simple and easy."

Martorano became chief revenue officer of Intermedia in 2016 after an eight-year stint as general manager of U.S. partner sales for Microsoft. He said the past two years have "been an absolute blast."

"We've transformed over the years ... to where now over 50 percent of our revenue is sitting in the area of UCaaS," he said. "Over 80 percent of our new business is coming through the channel. So more focus on the channel, more focus on the area of UCaaS and the huge transformation that we're seeing as a company with our partner community."