Mia Distribution debuts Channel UC business unit

Mia Distribution has launched a new business unit, dubbed Channel UC, specialising in voice enablement for the reseller channel, representing an end-to-end offering at least two years in the making. 

The so-called Channel UC program is the result of partnerships with a number of global technology providers, including Eclipse UC, powered by Centile Telecom applications, along with Zoom, RingCentral, and involving a recent launch of Microsoft Teams direct routing-as-a-service to channel partners. 

According to Mia Distribution's co-owner and sales director Matt Milne, the new business unit and the offering at its core is the result of no less than two years of work by the specialist distributor. 

“Mia Distribution has historically been a UC hardware distributor,” Milne told ARN. “[But] about two years ago, we noticed a lot of resellers coming to us, saying, ‘we don’t want to necessarily be a wholesale provider of one of the Tier 1s, we want to compete with something different.’”

“So, we went to market looking for a cloud calling platform. It’s probably about two years old now. Our commercial platform for the Eclipse UC, which is a carrier-grade soft switch, went live about a year ago. That’s one of the offerings. 

“We also have RingCentral, which we signed a master agency agreement with last year; that’s another offering. [And we’ve launched] Microsoft Teams, which makes for a very compelling offering in the market, certified with a lot of the hardware endpoints that we distribute,” he added. 

The idea for the Channel UC program specifically arose as a result of the channel interest by partners relating to what Mia Distribution could do with those four products, tied in together. 

But, the new offering doesn’t end there.

“We also went to market for a cloud-based billing platform, and this is what really separated us in our offering, in that we could enable our resellers to become voice service providers in their own right,” Milne said. 

Now, with the UC Channel business unit up and running as a single entity, Milne claims that Mia Distribution has the capacity to essentially double its previous value proposition for partners. 

“In the past you could come to us and get your complete end-to-end hardware unified communication solution, headsets, video conferencing, handsets, audio conferencing peripherals,” Milne said. 

“Now, we will be enabling our resellers’ entire voice strategy, from the voice hosted PBX that they’re using, mobile applications, voice collaboration, carrier interconnect, so we can actually supply the carriage through our upstream carriage relationships to resellers. They really don’t need to go anywhere else to have voice offering in the market,” he added. 

Broadly, the distributor sees Channel UC as a way to remove some of the complexity of investing and managing back-end infrastructure on behalf of resellers, while also supporting them and ensuring they have competitive unified communications (UC) solutions in a fast changing telco environment. 

“We are adapting to the changes in the market and ensuring we can support our resellers ability to create alternative revenue streams.  Our Channel UC model is growing 40 per cent month on month which gives an indication for the speed at which the demand for UC is growing in the Australian channel,” Milne said.