UpCurve Cloud Teams With Avant To Deliver Google G Suite Through Telco Agents

The Los Angeles-based cloud services provider sees a unique opportunity in the market to extend Google's channel by inking deals with master agents.

UpCurve Cloud is looking to spur its Google G Suite services practice through a largely untapped but highly influential channel.

Master agents haven't traditionally been significant resellers of Google's cloud-based office productivity software, but many of their sub-agents could uniquely benefit from bringing to market that product—if they had assistance from a skilled Google partner, Joey Maller, UpCurve's vice president of sales, told CRN.

For UpCurve, seizing the opportunity to be that partner meant striking a deal with Avant, and perhaps more master agencies in the future, as those organizations and their agent networks branch out beyond telecom, Maller said.

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UpCurve, headquartered in Los Angeles, hopes to complement the work of Avant agents who are increasingly asked to help SMB customers move critical business software from on-premises to the cloud—an area often out of their wheelhouses.

Known as ViWo before it was acquired by New York-based holding company New Media Investment Group a few years back, UpCurve around that time started shifting from exclusively reselling SaaS to more-comprehensive IT consulting, with emphasis on Google technology combined with CRM and telephony solutions.

Soon after, "we saw a gap in the channel world where there's a lot of these agents out there not selling any email collaboration stuff. They don’t know it," Maller said. They're "selling UCaaS or telephony, but nothing else."

And those master agents that were empowering their networks to bring cloud solutions to market were typically working with Microsoft Office 365, he said.

UpCurve set out to form a strategic alliance with Avant, and after some effort, "finally got accepted into their vendors' portfolio" as a provider of G Suite services that can be integrated with CRM and telephony.

Now on the Avant roster, UpCurve can advise those agents on Google solutions that can be integrated with the Unified Communications-as-a-Service packages they are already selling, extending G Suite exposure in one of its strongest markets.

"Their agents are trusted advisors to their customers. They have the business' ear in terms of what technology they should be using," Maller said. "They just need to advise their customers that there is a better solution out there, based on their needs. A lot of times, Google fits a business much better than O365."

And if G Suite is selected, UpCurve delivers implementation services in concert with the sub-agent.

The UpCurve services offering is boosted by a business analytics tool, Prodoscore, that delivers insights on employees' day-to-day functions. UpCurve is the exclusive Prodoscore reseller, as it originally developed the technology in-house before pushing it out to a third-party.

While UpCurve fields its own UCaaS practice; with partners like Vonage, Dialpad and RingCentral; those solutions aren't relevant to its partnership with Avant, as telco is the bread-and-butter of the sub-agents it hopes to work with.

"We just want to complement that sale," Maller said.

UpCurve onboarded with Avant last week and has already closed a hundred-seat deal with a sub-agent who called soon after—affirming the company's decision to seek the partnership with a master agent.

"There is a need, there is a gap in this world, this agent, trusted advisor world," Maller said.