'We want 80 per cent of our EMEA revenue from the channel by 2027': Zoom

We sat down with Dion Smith, Zoom’s EMEA partner boss, to chat about the company’s growth plans in the channel and what the future looks like

Zoom is planning to grow its EMEA channel business to make up 80 per cent of revenues in the region.

The unified comms giant is shifting focus to place the channel as a top priority as the group views the "channel as the multiplier for the organisation."

CRN spoke to Dion Smith, head of EMEA channels at Zoom who joined the company just over a year ago with the aim of growing its EMEA business, which at the time made up 17 per cent of Zoom's EMEA revenue.

The video conferencing firm was first created in 2011, and was fairly successful until COVID completely changed the game, blowing business out of proportion and putting the company in the spotlight.

"But despite that, what's very clear is that in order to be able to continue to scale at the pace that we have been growing as an organisation, in order to be able to reach certain industries, verticals, customer segments, it's imperative that you have an ecosystem and a partner strategy where you can execute on that," Smith said.

"So, for the company to continue to allow the value of what we have to be able to get into those industries, vertical segments, it's not a decision - it's a necessity."

Creating an ecosystem

He stressed that for Zoom, being able to create an effective ecosystem with the right capabilities and competencies within partners is the key to give the company greater depth and reach within the markets it wants to operate in.

"We've been spending a lot of time over these last 14 months since I joined, rebuilding our ecosystem, from distribution all the way through to strategic partnerships," Smith said regarding his strategy for expanding channel reach in EMEA.

He added Zoom has been working on identifying what its distribution landscape in Europe needs to look like, having signed larger distribution relationships, such as TD Synnex.

"Those are to complement the existing distribution partners that we have within our business.

"We've also been extending our reach into higher level SIs and GSIs, to be able to give and to reach organisations that want to talk about an entire platform opportunity.

"And we've also been cementing further partnerships with some of the service providers, the likes of BT, Telefonica, UBS, Deutsche Telekom."

From a resourcing perspective, Smith explained how Zoom has been investing into specialists and different channels and sales roles to be able to complement those areas.

"So further distribution, account managers, channel account managers, solution engineers, so really building that out to be able to be the best vendor that we can for our partners."

Finally, Zoom's channel boss explained that developing its partner programme has also been crucial to building out the company's channel business.

"We introduced our first partner programme at the early part of last year. And we've been evolving that as our as our platform has been evolving."