For years, many MSPs and VARs have treated communications as an adjacent opportunity, rather than a core part of the managed services stack. Voice, connectivity and collaboration services fit naturally alongside cloud, cybersecurity, endpoint management, and business applications, but telecom has carried a level of tax, billing and regulatory complexity that many IT partners have been reluctant to absorb.
That hesitation has often pushed partners toward referral or commission-based models, limiting their ability to truly own the customer relationship and capture the full recurring revenue opportunity. But, as hybrid work, Microsoft Teams voice adoption, AI-enabled customer engagement, and demand for integrated IT services continue to converge, communications is becoming harder for the channel to ignore.
BCM One ’s new partnership with TD SYNNEX is aimed squarely at that gap. The agreement gives TD SYNNEX partners access to BCM One’s Pure IP Global Voice and Network Services and SkySwitch white-label UCaaS platform, while BCM One manages much of the telecom taxation, compliance, billing and back-office complexity that has historically kept IT partners from building communications practices of their own.
Marcie Stout
“A lot of the reseller community has been avoiding it,” said Marcie Stout, Vice President, Google, Cloud Marketplaces & ISV Alliances at TD SYNNEX. “Or, a lot of times, instead of going down the path of facing the telco taxes, they’re doing more of a referral model — commission-based models — and not getting that top line.”
The Telecom Barrier for IT Partners
The partnership addresses one of the most persistent obstacles in the IT channel: Communications services can be attractive from a recurring revenue and customer stickiness standpoint, but telecom taxation and regulatory compliance introduce risks many MSPs and VARs are simply not built to manage.
Unlike many cloud or software services, telecom taxes can vary across countries, states, counties and municipalities. That creates a moving target for partners that may already manage customers across multiple geographies.
“The biggest part is it varies not just by state. It varies of course by country, but also by county, municipality, and even at the parish level in some cases,” explained Bryan Sheppeck, Chief Revenue Officer at BCM One.
He added that regulations are constantly changing and, if you get it wrong, the process to re-file is burdensome.
“You really want to get it right the first time,” he said.
That complexity has created a meaningful gap in many MSP portfolios. Partners may already be trusted advisors for cloud, security, devices, infrastructure and applications, but voice has often remained outside their direct service offerings. Some have avoided it entirely, while others have handed the opportunity to a third party through referral arrangements.
For TD SYNNEX, adding BCM One creates a path for partners to enter that market without having to build the telecom compliance infrastructure themselves. Stout noted that BCM One fits strategically into TD SYNNEX’s broader technology solutions distribution program because it helps partners expand into communications while reducing the operational burden that has historically come with telecom.
“It really gives the MSP world a level-up, so they can put more value in,” Stout said. “It’s branded with them, so it really expands that reach for us.”
For BCM One, the relationship expands its access to a new partner community. The company has long worked through agent and channel partnerships with a loyal and growing partner community. In fact, SkySwitch is fresh off its Vectors 2026 partner conference, which brought together hundreds of partners already selling branded telecom services on its white-label platform. TD SYNNEX has the potential to significantly add to that partner mix with its large ecosystem of MSPs, VARs, system integrators and enterprise IT partners.
Bryan Sheppeck
“It’s really about broadening the partner spectrum that we reach,” Sheppeck said. “The work we do through the agent community brings certain types of partners, but this depth of MSP partnerships that TD SYNNEX brings for our white-label business, the depth of integration and VARs they bring for our Pure IP business, is a significant enhancement to our channel.”
Bill-on-Behalf, Without Losing the Customer Relationship
At the center of BCM One’s value proposition is its bill-on-behalf capability, part of its broader billing strategy. The service is designed to handle not only customer bills, but also telecom tax calculation, accrual, filing, withholding and remittance.
For partners, the distinction matters. BCM One manages the complexity behind the scenes, but the billing can remain under the partner’s brand. That allows MSPs and resellers to present communications as part of their own service portfolio, rather than pushing customers into another provider relationship.
“We can do all of that for them, all of the compliance filings, the actual remit of the taxes, the withholding of the taxes, the accrual,” Sheppeck explained. “We do it all while keeping the billing under their brand, so it feels to the end user that the MSP or whoever the partner is, is their service provider, but we’re really doing it behind the scenes – all that collection and remittance as well as the calculations and filings.”
The model addresses both the risk and the operational burden. Partners do not have to hire telecom tax specialists, maintain compliance processes across multiple jurisdictions, or build back-office systems to support complex usage-based billing. Instead, they can focus on sales, customer relationship management, and service packaging.
For MSPs, that is especially important because their value is often built on being the primary technology relationship for SMB customers. If voice remains outside the managed services portfolio, another provider controls a key part of the customer environment.
Stout said that is one reason the white-label model is significant. It gives partners a way to deliver the full IT and communications stack while maintaining the trust and familiarity they have already built with customers.
“It’s branded, it’s white-labeled, Bill IQ – it gives customers confidence,” she said. “They’re comfortable with their MSP and, if you flip it the other way, it gives the resellers that ability finally to do the entire IT and communication stack.”
The recurring revenue model is also a central to the story. Communications services tend to be less project-based than many traditional IT sales, and they can become deeply embedded in a customer’s operations once users, numbers, workflows and collaboration tools are integrated.
“Communication services generally have higher stickiness than hardware, because when you integrate voice and all the phone numbers into a platform, that really makes churn drop significantly,” Stout said. “Then they have that financial base. So, it’s less project-based like traditional IT and more financial stability.”
Sheppeck added that SkySwitch partners can generate healthy margins because they are delivering value on top of the UCaaS platform, while BCM One handles much of the operational work required in the background.
What’s also important is this creates an opportunity for TD SYNNEX partners to re-market to their existing customers with a new service line, to drive even deeper relationships and stickiness – without adding significantly to the workload.
“We’ve really developed a platform where they don’t have to do very much other than the sales motion,” Sheppeck added.
Voice Is Becoming Strategic Again
The timing of the partnership also reflects a broader shift in how businesses think about voice. For years, voice has been seen by many as something of a legacy or declining service, compared with cloud applications, collaboration platforms and digital channels. While that has never truly been the reality – voice has always been a critical communications channel even as minutes have become commoditized – what’s changed more recently is customer behavior and AI are changing that perception. It’s bringing telecom to the forefront again.
Voice remains a preferred interface for many types of customer engagement, whether the interaction is with a human agent or an AI-powered virtual agent. At the same time, advances in transcription, analytics and AI make voice interactions more valuable as a source of business intelligence.
“Voice is back, baby!” Sheppeck told me during our conversation.
His point was not simply that businesses still need phone service. Rather, he argued that voice has become a richer data source because companies can now analyze conversations at scale.
“For the first time, it’s actually practical to ‘listen to’ all of those calls, even the ones handled by virtual agents, and then mine those for insights, whether that’s correlation between agents and complaints or delivery processes, keyword trending or sentiment analysis so that you can coach the team,” he said.
That creates a new opening for MSPs. Many SMBs don’t have data science teams or large consulting budgets to help them apply AI to customer engagement. But, they might have a trusted MSP that already supports their technology environment. If that MSP also owns the communications layer, it is better positioned to help customers capture, analyze and act on communications data and make the most of every interaction and opportunity.
“Now that MSP is in a great position to say, let me show you how to harness AI,” Sheppeck said. “The starting point is probably customer communications, so there’s suddenly an appetite for getting into voice and being in line for all of those communications. There’s recognition of the opportunity that AI unlocks.”
The Microsoft Teams opportunity adds another dimension. As Teams has become central to enterprise collaboration, many organizations are still working through how to integrate voice, PSTN connectivity and global calling into the platform. Pure IP gives TD SYNNEX partners a way to address that opportunity for enterprise customers, particularly through Teams Operator Connect and related PSTN capabilities.
Sheppeck said the market is still early in terms of how deeply Teams voice will penetrate Microsoft 365 environments.
“I still think we’re still just scratching the surface of how deep that will go,” he said. “If you do the math, about a third of Teams users are connected to the PSTN via Teams, and only about 20% of 365 licensees are using Teams for voice.”
That creates two distinct but complementary routes to market for TD SYNNEX partners. SkySwitch is well-positioned for MSPs serving SMBs with white-label UCaaS, while Pure IP is equally well aligned with VARs and integrators serving larger enterprises with global voice, managed connectivity and Teams-related communications requirements.
Together, the two brands allow TD SYNNEX partners to address communications needs across all customer segments without having to assemble separate telecom, compliance and billing capabilities on their own. That’s the real key here.
The TD SYNNEX ecosystem gets another way to help partners expand wallet share and deliver more complete technology solutions. For BCM One, it creates a broader channel path into MSP, VAR and SI markets. For partners, the opportunity is more direct: Communications can become part of their portfolios without forcing them to become telecom compliance experts.
That may be the most significant piece of this partnership. The question for MSPs is no longer whether voice and communications belong in the managed services stack. They do. The challenge has been delivering those services profitably, under their own brands, and without getting caught up in the tax, billing and regulatory burden and complexity that comes with telecom.
BCM One and TD SYNNEX are betting that removing that burden will bring more IT partners into communications and position them for a new wave of recurring revenue, customer engagement and AI-driven service opportunities.
