Aura in Amsterdam: Our European Partner Summit

On 23^rd-24^th November 2022, we held our first European Partner Summit in Amsterdam to recap on the last five years, explore the current market status, and discuss our vision for the future – not to mention re-joining forces with our valued partners to plan for a successful 2023.

So, what was on the agenda?

Welcome and introductions

Our European Partner Summit started on the evening of Wednesday 23^rd November, when we hosted welcome drinks and a dinner for all delegates. This was an early opportunity for networking amongst partners along with key Aura stakeholders.

After a fun first night in our beautiful Amsterdam surroundings, Aura CEO, Tony Parish led the official welcome and introductions. Many of our partners had yet to meet some of Aura’s new faces in person, so it provided the perfect opportunity to introduce our new VP of Global Sales, Mark Fletcher, as well as Scott Hudson, our recently appointed COO.

Tony shared his view of Aura, its evolution, and the reasons behind some of the changes we’ve made over the past five years. Put frankly, they’ve been driven by customer challenges in five key areas:

1. The IT department doesn’t know what they have
2. Users don’t know what systems they use
3. Telephony that extends beyond Microsoft Teams
4. Regulation and compliance
5. Operational transition

Reviewing the UC market

Next up was Jonathan Harris, our Chief Strategy Officer, who took a closer look at the UC market and upcoming trends. He focussed particularly on the growth of cloud communications and the external factors that are affecting the market, such as inflation.

Jonathan then moved on to outline how Aura’s service offer is evolving to meet the new world of cloud, while still being considerate of those technologies where it’s not as simple as just dropping them into a fluffy cloud – the tricky 20% as we call it.

Discussing challenges and customer wants

The day continued with an interactive roundtable discussion, facilitated by our COO, Scott Hudson. Partners were invited to share their views, experiences, and challenges with unified communications as a whole, but more importantly in relation to their customers biggest wants.

This interactive session was vital in strengthening our partnership as well as looking at ways to address customer needs and improving our services going forward. Luckily for us, the key customer wants identified by our partners closely matched those we are seeing, and are already addressing, within our own customer base.

They include:

• Microsoft Office 365 integration
• Microsoft Teams integration
• Open integration with WFM / WFO and AI
• Open API graphical programming environment
• Bring your own carrier
• Everyone is an agent
• Reduce the risk of migration
• Single view analytics
• Single global partner

Our vision for the future

The day was brought to a close by Mark Fletcher, Aura’s VP of Global Sales. He summarised his vision for Aura and all of our partners. Quite simply, now is the time to start building plans for the future. We want to maintain a close working relationship with our partners and leverage the changing landscape, with our partners by our side.

Together, we can continue to deliver the exceptional service our customers expect.

Our first European Partner Summit was a great success. Now more than ever, Aura is ready for the future of communications.

If your challenges or wants resonate with those we have detailed above, we’re ready and waiting to hear from you. Contact our team today to talk through your global communications challenges and find out how Aura can help.