Two of Australia’s telecommunications technology distribution veterans, CommsPlus Distribution and BTC Wholesale, have announced a merger that serves to strengthen their ability to support MSPs and other value-adding channel organisations through services.
“Over the last few years, BTC Wholesale has invested significantly in building a suite of products and a portfolio of network partners, moving from the peripheral side of unified communications towards collaboration solutions – a market which globally grew by 11.4% last year,” explained Paul Bailye.
Prior to the merger activity, Bailye was the group CEO and managing director of CommsPlus Distribution; he retains a role as head of the newly merged entity.
“It made sense for us to join forces for greater scale and to leverage synergies, increase our footprint, and bring a wider range of products and services to our almost-doubled partner base. The key to this is unified communications, collaboration, and audiovisual solutions.”
A New MSP Focus
The merged organisations will trade as CommsPlus Distribution. Prior to the merger, CommsPlus Distribution had been steadily growing the number of MSPs that it supported to the point that these MSPs comprised 25% of the business. Now, with BTC Wholesale, Bailye expects to see the company grow again and around that same amount.
“Our business has traditionally been aligned with communications service providers (CSPs), but given the speed of MSPs coming online, it’s important we approach them with solutions that create new opportunities and enable them to build and re-build products; the same applies for our existing CSP partner base,” Bailye said.
He went on to add the following:
“We’re aligning with the fact that cloud-based unified communications have become much more accessible, which we are addressing with more SaaS and subscription-based products and a new e-commerce marketplace. This now enables partners with the ability to let customers adopt new innovations and capabilities at their own pace, regardless of whether they have on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solutions in place.”
Some recent wins for CommsPlus Distribution include a partnership with NEC to supply its cloud suite of unified communications, integrated contact centre and collaboration solutions, and on-premises solutions. CommsPlus Distribution also partnered with Grandstream in late August to take over the major Telstra account for the vendor.
BTC Wholesale, based in Queensland, has historically a lower profile, but its website lists partnerships that include AVer, Yealink, DTEN, Heckler, and MAXHUB.
MSPs can now work with the newly merged CommsPlus Distribution across three pillars. The first is unified communications, including on-premises and private and unified communications as a service (UCaaS). The second is contact centre as a service (CCaaS), which includes collaboration across meeting rooms, professional AV, health, education, and headsets. Finally, the merged company also supports MSPs with displays and devices, which includes networking, Wi-Fi, ATA’s peripherals, and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) handsets.