SMBs want, and get, a lot of service choices - Part 2

Cypress Communications proves that some SMBs really just want the basics with a little icing. Cypress recently bought Reignmaker Communications because, among other things, it had tools to serve smaller customers that Cypress' UC offering overserved. 

"Ten people in an office don't need messaging, presence and video," said Frank Grillo, executive vice president of marketing at Cypress. "I'm not saying they don't need UC; I'm saying that many of them are not ready for a full suite of UC." 

That runs counter to the thinking at ShoreTel, where marketing vice president Kevin Gavin flatly states, "even the smaller businesses need and want and should have UC. It's a fallacy that only big companies should benefit from UC." 

Gavin offers the widest range of anyone as to what comprises an SMB: 50 to 5,000 users. That kind of wild variance leads to an equally wild in-house tech capability. 

"When you're below 50 it might be nobody, but when you get above 50 there's somebody in charge of facilities, somebody in IT," he said. "You have a router, a small network, some appliances, something going on." 

Even with on-site technical expertise, the SMB needs help from an outsider like ShoreTel, he said. 

"We are about distributed architecture," he said. "The hosted guys ... put you up in the clouds and you put phones on-prem and that's great but there are reliability issues and there are some cost issues. Our perspective is that distributed is what makes sense ... and depending on the customer circumstances that might be customer prem, it might be disaster recovery site or it might be in a centralized managed services location." 

There is a need for flexibility between the everything on-site model and hosting everything in the Internet cloud or a software as a service (SaaS) model. 

"I have IT people who have to be able to get at it, have to be able to manage it ... and they want to be able to touch and feel it," Gavin said. "For them, on-prem equipment makes sense. Other people don't really care about what it is or what it looks like, wherever it makes the most sense and is economic, that's good."

Digium's Switchvox product sits in the middle as well. Let the small business do its business and let someone else take care of the technical aspects of communications, said Tristan Degenhardt, product marketing director. 

"A small bakery may need a Web site and a phone system and all the other things that make a business run software-wise. They need time to bake; they don't need time to tinker around with all these systems, so they're far more likely to go with a managed service," she said.  

This article is continued...