GoTo’s Still Waiting for Channel Convergence
And so is everyone else, despite moves by MSPs into communications and moves by communication partners into IT services.
Logically, businesses these days should want one partner for all things technology, not one for communications and connectivity and another for IT services. Just as logically, the lines separating telco partners from IT partners should be fading from view as a result. And they are, only incompletely and very slowly, as a couple of conversations made clear last week during the Channel Partners Conference & Expo/MSP Summit in Las Vegas.
Not coincidentally, that event exemplified the state of so-called “channel convergence” today in both design and execution. Hosted by the same corporate parent at the same time at the same Las Vegas hotel, the twin shows featured separate content tracks and separate expo halls containing mostly different exhibitors, one for telco agents and one for MSPs. So close, yet so far, in other words.
That’s exactly what they’re seeing at GoTo. The company, which merged with LogMeIn in 2016, began selling a converged set of communications, collaboration, contact center, and IT solutions under the GoTo brand back in 2022 in a move reflecting the then widespread belief that convergence was coming soon. And that belief wasn’t entirely wrong either. Some 80% of partners frequently bundle IT and telco connectivity solutions at present, according to Canalys.
Yet this January, just shy of three years after GoTo became GoTo’s sole brand, the company began offering the IT part of its portfolio under the LogMeIn name, a change reflecting the undeniable fact that while the lines between telco partners and MSPs have gotten blurrier, they still very much exist.
“The MSP who was very focused on the areas of the remote IT support, remote management, break-fix, that’s still the core of their business, but they absolutely are seeing the returns on the communication side,” observes Mike Day (pictured right), GoTo’s vice president of global partner sales. Traditional communications partners are branching out into IT services too, he adds. “But no one has completely strayed away from the core skill of what they do.”
And with good reason. “The technologies are absolutely different,” Day explains. “It might be the same company buying both types of technology, but the use case, the application, and the procurement are all very different.”
Actually, GoTo and LogMeIn solutions do have one, perhaps predictable, thing in common, and it’s shown up in a series of announcements involving both product lines during this young year alone. The most recent, which arrived a little under three weeks ago, concerned AI Receptionist, a “smart assistant” for the GoTo Connect communications platform that unlike a typical human receptionist is both happy to work 24/7 and multilingual.
“Right away, there are five different languages that can natively be spoken into it, and five more that are right behind it,” Day says.
According to GoTo, more members of the “GoTo Connect Digital Workforce” will begin arriving soon, with a whole lot of other AI-related features to follow in the years ahead.
“AI will never not be a focus,” Day says. “AI today is smarter than it was yesterday, and tomorrow it’s going to run faster than it is today.”