Once a year, we bring our partner community together somewhere worth the trip. This September it was Rydges Resort in the Hunter Valley for APC26: Conversations in the Valley.
We asked partners to be honest about it, they were.
Those who attended, rated the overall experience of the event 9.2 out of 10, returned a Net Promoter Score of +87, with zero detractors. 97% of those who gave feedback rated the session content “Good” or “Excellent” on the scale, and 87% surveyed said APC26 beat the other industry events they have recently attended.
Numbers are useful. What partners said in the room tells you more.
The session everyone kept talking about
The opening from Chairman Scott Carter and CEO Tim Jackson set the tone for three days. Customers don’t want to be sold to. They want a trusted advisor.
That message stuck. EV from Generation E summed it up: “There’s so many sellers out there, so many solutions out there, so much noise out there. Become the trusted advisor, solve the problem. The sale will come to you.”
Storytelling was the most-cited takeaway across the interviews, and partners saw it as a practical sales skill. Tim from Connecttel described it as “a good way to bring real-world scenarios to your customers so they understand what you do, instead of just blurting tech jargon at them.” Zahid from Cloudland in New Zealand called it “quite innovative and quite authentic,” with a focus on value over numbers.
For service providers competing in a crowded market, that matters. The partner who can explain the outcome is the partner who wins the deal.
AI you could pick up the phone and call
AI was the dominant topic on Day 1, and partners didn’t have to take it on faith. The AI Voice Assistant was demonstrated live on stage, and partners rang it themselves.
For Daniel from Corp Centre, that was the highlight: “To be able to see it live at the event, to ring it up and ask questions and see it live on stage. I think Access4 is doing a cracking job in that department.”
Gayan from Cloudland, whose team already runs AI agents for some customers, said it compared well against what they use today.
Partners also saw AI working on their side of the business. David from Black Box Technologies NZ came away “really, really pleased with the new SASBOSS demonstration,” pointing to the ability to provision on the fly using AI.
A room full of real wins
Ask a room of partners about their year and you hear what’s working in the market. The wins shared at APC26 had one thing in common: partners stacking multiple products on one platform to solve a bigger customer problem.
Zara from FlexaUC delivered a contact centre redundancy solution for a mutual bank. The customer asked for it in four weeks. FlexaUC delivered in two, and the bank has since engaged them to replace its entire contact centre.
Chin from Concept Comms moved an existing customer off legacy BroadSoft handsets onto Teams, contact centre and call recording as the business expanded nationally. All of it was provisioned through SASBOSS, with no site visits required. As Chin put it: “Now they’ve got a platform that they can grow on.”
Generation E is rolling out around 3,600 numbers for a major Australian retailer, alongside a national deployment for a large New Zealand not-for-profit. Plexus IT has 22 kindergarten sites running Teams, centrally managed. Arc Projects and Precision IT are both mid-rollout on ROGER365.io.
That’s the other reason partners come back. Lee from RIT has now attended four or five APCs: “I always enjoy getting here and connecting with other partners.”
Support you can feel from day one
The Access4 team welcomed partners at every stage of the relationship, from brand new to more than a decade in. Kapilash from Ricoh Australia joined the network recently: “It’s been unreal, to be honest with you. It’s been such a smooth journey. Everyone’s been super friendly.”
Tim from Connecttel, another new partner, described on-boarding as extensive and well organised, with the Access4 team genuinely engaged in helping them understand the portfolio.
At the other end, Corp Centre has worked with Access4 for more than 10 years. Daniel credited the support team with making their first Microsoft Teams deployment “a lot easier to understand for our client also.”
“Access4 is here to back us in terms of our marketing, our go-to-market and just the full support of our clients, whether that’s through the Academy team, pro services or even just the development of the products, and knowing that what we’re asking for is being done.” Zara, Flexa UC
Room for the conversations that matter
The R U OK? session on Day 2 was one of the most mentioned highlights in the survey. It gave partners space to talk about mental health in an industry that rarely slows down.
Qiusi from Fuse Technology said it best: “We’re not only focusing on products. We actually care about people, the customers and the staff we have.”
Already planning for 2027
Partners also told us what they want more of next year: hands-on SASBOSS labs, facilitated partner roundtables on win stories and growth, and more breathing room between sessions. We’re building those in.
Want to be in the room next year?
APC is exclusive to Access4 partners. It’s where partners hear the roadmap first, test new products before they reach the market, and swap notes with the people solving the same problems they are.
Access4 works only through the channel. We don’t compete with our partners. SASBOSS gives you one platform to provision, bill and manage UC, CX and AI solutions for your customers, backed by the support, enablement and go-to-market help partners talked about all week.
