10. Channel Embraces UCaaS

One of the most immediate impacts of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and probably the one with the longest future impact, was the move by businesses to embrace unified communications, particularly videoconferencing, as a mainstream technology. As businesses sent their employees home to work remotely as a way to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, they needed a way to help ensure those workers could continue collaborating. And the channel responded with a massive push to make platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex essential viewing for their clients.

The pandemic quickly created unparalleled opportunities for solution providers to drive sales of the collaboration and unified communications-as-a-service, or UCaaS, technologies while bringing their own services into play. As a result, videoconferencing as a service became ubiquitous as people across the U.S. rearchitected their lives to work, learn and receive health care from home, and the word “Zoom” entered the national lexicon as synonymous with videoconferencing. Microsoft said that by late April, Teams usage had rocketed past 75 million daily active users, which was four times the base of the previous November.