Andrew Kernebone, GoTo director of presales APAC and Yvette McEnearney, GoTo senior director, channel sales APAC.
GoTo, one of the leading global providers of flexible work technology, held its first-ever Philippine partner summit and the second one in Southeast Asia. The decision to hold the inaugural Philippine partner summit manifests the significant growth in the country and the region, where GoTo solutions uptake increased by 30% since the regional expansion in early 2022. The event featured the IT Management and Support, and Business Communications portfolio roadmaps of GoTo. We sat with Andrew Kernebone, GoTo Director of Presales APAC, and Yvette McEnearney, GoTo Senior Director, Channel Sales APAC, in a Manila Bulletin exclusive interview.
“The reason we chose to do the summit in the Philippines is that we gained quite a lot of traction through our strong partnership with our distributor VST-ECS. We brought on board partners and had some successes in the Philippines with Inspiro and the Philippine National Bank (PNB). It was a good time for us to come up and get face to face with the partners and really understand a bit more about what they see in the market and being able to help them sort of look at how we can expand,” said McEnearney.
“The successful take-up rate of our IT Management and Support solutions such as GoTo Resolve and Rescue in the Philippines, has been largely due to the insight and understanding of the local landscape by our channel partners. We are proud to share that over the last two years, our IT solutions portfolio in the Philippines has garnered 65% revenue growth, 30% customer growth, and 40% channel growth for the company. Following the partner summit, we are confident that our channel focused approach across SEA will lead GoTo to even greater heights,” Kernebone added.
Successes in the region and the Philippines
McEnearney attributed the regional success of GoTo to its channel ecosystem, stating that company is 100% channel in the region. “We really rely on the channel ecosystem to help us grow. We give them confidence that as a vendor, we will not come in, take over, and have accounts directly. We are working very closely with our partners who we can educate and understand the technology,” she said.
“We train our own sales and technical teams and our partners. That way, when they are in the market they can be confident. We have some wins and some good brands around those wins. Those give a lot of confidence and leverage, and they are really driving and make sure that we got case studies that we can leverage,” McEnearney continued.
One of GoTo success stories in the country is the case of Inspiro. Previously, the BPO firm struggled with technology issues and the lack of a robust IT support system. They wanted to have visibility of all their endpoints from their workstation down to the service in the data center. Eventually, they implemented the rescue remote support solution of GoTo and that allowed Inspiro to provide during the pandemic an instant support to remote users in a way that enables their internal staff to quickly get into a support session and resolve the issue for the customer or end user and then get back out again and get that stuff done quickly.
Solutions made in a hurry during the pandemic
GoTo executives said that the significant uptake in the market has to do with hybrid work. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated things around unified communications and on the support side because organizations have people in different scenarios who are either not in an office or working from home. Kernebone shared some of the key trends he noticed during the pandemic.
“There are few trends that have come into play, and those trends impact not only how our customers and partners behave but also how we behave as an IT company building products for first market. We saw a very challenging period through the pandemic where basically every organization prepared in time the transition from being primarily on premise in office to primarily at home for many of their employees based on what industry they are in. We saw that as a big challenge, and many decisions made very quickly were to keep the lights on and businesses running. Remote support tool sets were made in a hurry, and those decisions are probably being revisited now,” said Kernebone.
Kernebone said they have been seeing increasing digitization through the years, but the pandemic really accelerated that. It created a flexion point where companies were forced to do something about it, and they probably moved far more quickly than they had ever had before.
“A couple of years from that point, we see that most organizations now are in blend or hybrid work. There are some organizations that are fully back in the office, but for most organizations there is a combination of at-home and in-office workforce. Some organizations are likely remote now and may have dispensed with the office. That causes a challenge for organizations and how they support their workforces and, along with that, there is just an increasing complexity in no small part due to that hybrid nature of work and how do you provide support for employees in the office and at home in a way that is equitable across those two different types of employees with their locations. The Frost and Sullivan research we have done recently shows that IT budgets are increasing, but along with the increase is the increasing complexity and workload for staffs in organizations,” he continued.
Solutions consolidation and artificial intelligence
Three years ago, organizations made rush decisions because they had to have solutions in place, and many organizations have ended up with multiple tools with some overlapping capability set. Hence, there is a real trend toward consolidating those tools, and consolidation gives a couple of benefits to the organization.
“We see something like 80% of our smaller and medium enterprises prioritizing consolidation because it makes it easier for them and their support teams to operate and support internal staff. It also makes things like procurement and vendor relationships easier because you have fewer vendors to deal with,” said Kernebone.
“People are starting to consolidate around what they are using and they are looking at what that looks like. That is where it plays well for us because our platforms work well together in terms of being able to communicate and collaborate and then also go into being able to support customers with our IT support products. About 83% of the IT decision makers are struggling with consolidating the number of tools they are using, and they find a vendor that can consolidate,” McEnearney added.
With the Philippines exploring the possibility of establishing itself as an AI hub, GoTo executives also shared some insights, expressing their excitement for the country and the potential impact of AI on applications across various industries.
“Artificial intelligence is an interesting area not just for us. It is something that a lot of companies and people are grappling with what would be its impact on our technologies, on our lives, and on the way we work. ChatGPT-type AI solutions that have emerged in the last few months have exploded in a way that has been around for a while but not mass usage until just recently,” said Kernebone.
The GoTo executive noted that one of the exciting things about AI is the opportunities it opens for SMEs to become more competitive. “It gives them perhaps a presence that is more than they would otherwise be able to without this tool. You can look at things like automating repetitive tasks,” he continued.
Kernebone added that they are working around language translation that has AI back to it for the company’s rescue product, which is applicable to the BPO market in the Philippines. The solution helps English-speaking agents to deal with customers from three different language groups. The live translation solution allows BPO firms to support customers without having agents who can speak other languages.
To learn more about the GoTo-commissioned Frost & Sullivan research, visit the 2023 IT Priorities Report on the company website.