8x8’s senior vice president and global channel chief. He spoke of this opportunity during Wednesday's Channel Partners Virtual keynote titled “'Hey, You’re on Mute' … the Operate from Anywhere Opportunity.”

According to Forrester, an additional $15 billion was spent weekly on Band-Aid, work-from-home solutions during the first three months of the pandemic.

“Operate from anywhere was critically important,” UC tools. So how do we take advantage of that?”

It’s important to break down the silos between voice and contact center, he said. Voice and contact center run together.

“It’s you as a partner explaining to customers the benefits, and there are many, of having the same vendor, the same supplier in play for your voice and contact center solutions,” DeLozier said.

Secondly, it's breaking down the barriers around move to the cloud. They’re on-premises, so it's wide open. You have a group that's made a mad dash to the cloud with these disparate point solutions. And then you have those that have made the move to the cloud and they went the best-of-breed route. And now those partnerships between those best-of-breed vendors have dissipated and gone away.”

A big problem is lack of collaboration due to disparate tool sets and ineffective measurements, he said.

“The average IT team with your customers wastes 20 hours per month working on disparate, Band-Aid data point solutions that are not best in breed from the best-of-suite perspective,” DeLozier said. “That's six work weeks a year. That is a lot of time, and we definitely know that time is money. analytics and great data that pass over all of those places on one platform to give you the information that you need, integrated versus not integrated and jumping to the cloud. It is here to stay.”

This is the cross-sell and upsell opportunity for partners as customers are running to the cloud in an integrated way, he said.