VoIP Industry Newsletter: Volume 1: Issue 1

Oct 2008

In our first quarterly newsletter, I hope you find some inspiration about how VoIP technology - hosted, mobile, 2.0 - is gaining market-share slowly but surely. While there is a lot of hype surrounding how quickly VoIP will improve communications systems, reduce costs, and provide a 100% replacement technology for TDM, there are also now enough real life data-points to allow us to project how this will all play out. I'll share some ideas and my thoughts on what we see at VoIP Logic working with 100s of carriers and service providers.

From my perspective, I have seen enterprises switch to a hosted VoIP system when it does the following: improves their productivity, achieves tasks that can't as easily be accomplished otherwise, is offered to them by a trusted IT source and, most generally, saves them money and headaches. In this issue, we have a spotlight section on a customer that discusses how they have been successfully selling hosted VoIP bundled with data services to increasingly larger enterprises. Finally, a mantra I hear from all providers of hosted VoIP, is that BYOB (bring your own broadband) is too unreliable, too expensive to support and creates too much churn. The statistics seem to bear this out. So plan your network strategy very carefully.

Hosted VoIP has a leg up on IP PBXs (premise based PBXs) because carriers and service providers can integrate additional services at the request of enterprises with much greater ease and without waiting on software development by Avaya, Nortel, etc. For instance, service providers are able to pass along not only monitoring and management tools through Web portals, but they are also able to integrate invoicing, additional provisioning, diagnostic tools and third party developer plug-ins and resources that do not come 'standard'. In short, a hosted phone system, like any software provided as a service, is constantly upgrade-able from the core, which expands what is possible.

Some helpful tips to identify likely hosted VoIP target market customers:

• Enterprises using Hosted VoIP tend to have 20% or more of their workforce remote to a headquarters location - a circumstance which this technology bridges particularly well. The global trend towards a more dispersed workforce is gradual but it promotes hosted and managed business services.
• Enterprises have an increasing number of service providers offering everything from hosted Exchange server, computer management, LAN network management, VPN/WAN management, data network service provider and communications systems management. They want this to be simplified to fewer points of accountability for their business systems.
• Larger enterprises can really take advantage of productivity gains in one or more of their business systems. Once they feel comfortable with network stability (generally, dedicated bandwidth or MPLS) service providers, who are sensitive to the needs of medium sized enterprises and larger, should find fertile hunting grounds.

The mission of our quarterly newsletter is to provide a neutral voice to the dialogue about VoIP technology, hosted VoIP and the future of communications services.

Micah Singer - CEO, VoIP Logic


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