resellers

SPOTLIGHT: 10 ways to get better VoIP deals

Doug Mohney — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:20:14 -0500

With tighter credit and slower sales, it's a buyer's market. VoIP-News pulls out 10 ways to get the best deal on VoIP systems and services - it's not a list resellers are going to enjoy much.

At the top of the list is asking for competitive bids, but making sure you have a tight RFP and perhaps a consultant to garbage-filter convoluted answers to what should be straightforward technical specifications. Working the system with a multi-year contract on software and/or maintenance is suggested along with trying to get free feature upgrades and other goodies thrown in. Bundles are also a good way to save some cash.

Like car salespeople, vendors and salespeople have end-of-month and end-of-year quotas to make, so you've always got some leverage if you pick the right time to negotiate. We're not so sure that last recommendation -- "being a showcase for emerging technology" -- is the best way to save cash; pioneers are typically the guys with the arrows sticking out of their backs.

For more:
- VoIP-News lays out a 10 step program to save cash on your new VoIP system. Article.

Digium, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:39:06 -0500

Digium

Where it's based: Huntsville, AL
When it was founded: 1999
Website: www.digium.com

Why it's Fierce: Digium single-handedly defined open source telephony with Asterisk and is now almost always on the checklist for many businesses when it comes time to sit down for a discussion of IP telephony. Other open source competitors compare themselves to Asterisk and - perhaps the ultimate complement - Cisco has an internal marketing document loaded with talking points against the solution.

While it positions Asterisk as a customizable "telephony platform" to build solutions on rather than just a vanilla IP PBX, Digium continues to steadily evolve as it hires the best and brightest programmer and developer talent as well as seasoned executives. Partnering with Skype was a Fierce move and last year's acquisition of Switchvox gave the company a needed boost in providing a flexible SMB turnkey solution for resellers. About the only thing missing to complete its Cinderella story would be a blessing by a Fortune 500 IT powerhouse.

Allworx's new President: Re-engaging channels & PAETEC bundles

Doug Mohney — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:39:58 -0500

With three days on the job, Allworx President Jeff Howe sat down with FierceVoIP to talk about the challenges the company faces and the advantages integration with parent CLEC PAETEC brings to the table.

"We don't have a product problem," said Howe. "Our engineering and support are good... We have a revenue issue. How do we take it to the next level?"

Howe, formerly PAETEC's Vice President/General Manager for the Agent Channel, is focusing on re-engaging Allworx's resellers and to offer them new opportunities to generate both more revenue and monthly recurring revenue.

Part of the solution is to create new bundles and services leveraging PAETEC offerings with the baseline IP PBX telephony hardware and phones so resellers can provide more than a one-time revenue opportunity. PAETEC, a national telecommunications provider focused on "business-class" customers, generated over $1.6 billion in revenue last year. With a footprint covering more than 80 percent of the nation's 100 metropolitan areas, PAETEC certainly has the reach to support channel partners of all sizes.

Allworx resellers will soon have the option of creatively financing gear through PAETEC and bundling in monthly phone services. Resellers would get a cut of the monthly revenues from the PAETEC services that they sell.

In one model, PAETEC could provide a monthly financing option for Allworx equipment along with phone services on a single bill. A leasing-type arrangement would be a much more attractive option to businesses wanting to avoid a large, out-of-pocket capital expenditure. PAETEC could also provide other managed services through an Internet-based bundle, including off-site data backup and recovery, web server hosting, and managed firewall and router support.

Sutus raises cash, debt, hires new CEO

Doug Mohney — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:44:10 -0400

Vancouver-based Sutus has secured $2 million in venture funding, plus another $2.5 million in debt financing. It has also added a new CEO.

The $2 million in cash came from BDC Venture Capital, and the $2.5 million in debt financing is being provided by MMV Financial. In addition Sutus is bringing telecommunications veteran Mike Donnell on as CEO; Donnell previously lead New Global Telecom (NGT) as its CEO and has also clocked time as CEO of Zi Corporation and Cellular One.

Founded in 2002, Sutus has over $15.5 million invested into its all-in-one Business Central box targeted at the small office market. The company launched product in late 2007.

Sutus' Business Central was specifically developed for businesses with up to 25 employees and includes a phone system that supports both PSTN and VoIP connections, a file server, email server, router, firewall, wireless access point, VPN remote access server, and automated backups; it can also serve as a gateway for hosted servers and includes extensive remote management and support features for the VAR/resellers that install it. This reporter doesn't know if a kitchen sink option is available.

For more:
- Sutus announces new CEO, funding on MarketWatch. Release.

Windham parses Digium

Doug Mohney — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:53:59 -0400

Danny Windham has been CEO at Digium for nearly twenty months and realizes there's still a lot of work to be done at the open source telephony company. FierceVoIP caught up with Windham at Astricon a few weeks ago to get his latest thoughts on Digium's progress, the marketplace and challenges that lay ahead.

FierceVoIP: Are you happy with the way Switchvox has gone to market?

Windham: I think not, we haven't been at it long enough. We have gigantic work to do to reach small to medium-sized businesses. The reaction [to Switchvox] is so encouraging, it makes you want to do channel development even faster. The reason why we're not happy is we haven't been at it long enough.

Is it successful? The projections we made at the time we acquired Switchvox were pretty aggressive. We have met those projections and we're where we hoped to be at this point in time. The core team is still there and the strategy is improving month to month.

FierceVoIP: So where do you go from here?

Windham: There are a lot of investments we've been making. If you look at the first year of investments, they're all product related. There [have been] changes in strategy, the Switchvox acquisition, trying to decide what Digium is going to do. There's so much opportunity across so many customer bases. If we try to do it all, we can't do it very well.

It's hard to say, but we can't put all the children on the life raft with us.

Now it's about selling, and investing in sales.

FierceVoIP: How many resellers do you have right now?

Windham: Our reseller count has doubled in the last six months and is between 378 and 400. To get access to SMBs, there are millions of them out there, it's just a big job to get a channel to access them.

[Windham said that he'd like to have about 5 resellers in "lots of geographies," but enabling them to sell and be successful takes a while. VP of Global Marketing Leslie Conway said there was a lot of work to develop sales tools and training and getting in front of resellers to educate them]

FierceVoIP: Fonality sells their product through Dell's website and catalog. Do you see yourself in a mass market channel, like Microsoft's Response Point is down at Costco?

Windham: Dell is very much a marketing organization, it looks at [the catalog and web] as a way to be a profit center. If Dell is coming to commit activity to it, there are plenty of people supporting it. It takes a lot of energy to sell through that channel, just like through CDW, TechData.

[As for the mass market/"bigbox" consumer outlets] I don't think we want to try to address that market. It's so different, those channels are massive too. We won't be going there any time soon. We're selling to a little larger end-user than Respone Point with Switchvox, closer to a 30 end-user installation.

The thing we've heard that what sells Response Point is its really cool voice recognition technology. Most people turn that off after a month. We don't know why, but they do.

FierceVoIP: So what will you be offering to carriers?

Windham: That's one of those children we're not putting in the life raft.

In the short term, we have no plans to create a turn-key solution to sell to carriers... This is not a technology question, this is an availability of resources question. The life raft is not that big.

FierceVoIP: Why hasn't Digium landed a big customer endorsement?

Windham: I don't pretend to understand why. We have larger customers, but there is a reluctance [on their part] to talk about Asterisk. Some of it is they don't want their competitors to know what they're using for competitive reasons. Or they don't want to reveal network details for security considerations.

There may be some hold over from the image of open source in general. "Open source is for hackers, not for business." I don't know.

We do have installs of around 10,000 end points we can talk about....Integrics builds it, it's carrier class, running on clustered Asterisk. Enswitch is the product.

[There is] the premise that Asterisk doesn't scale. There are a lot of issues associated with scalability, but Asterisk can scale, the premise that it can't scale is wrong. Or at best, dated.

Could it be better? Of course, but it scales well today.

FierceVoIP: Any acquisition plans you can talk about?

Windham: Now that we've worked past the Switchvox acquisition, we can consider something else. There's nothing on the radar..[if we do] we would look for things that are very, very unique and specific that we can't go build.

FierceVoIP: You're hiring a lot of talent out of the open source community. Are you worried about taking too many in-house?

Windham: The company is no more than the sum total of its employees. We want the best people out there, the most knowledgeable, to do what we're trying to do, that's been our approach.

Taking developers out of the open community and putting them on other projects could have a downside. However, the group of open source developers is bigger and we're continuing to support them. We're spending more dollars then we ever have.

Take the concept of our two acquisitions. They were both in the last year, and they have worked out very well.

It is a good thing that [Digium] runs AstriCon. People are more comfortable if we run. But when we run it, we try to put on that third-party hat as tightly as it fits, and try do what is in the best interests of the [Asterisk] open source project. Some small factions could see that and think we have ulterior motives.

The Switchvox acquisition alienated some small portion of the community. They said: One, "We're so glad you did this, but we'd rather sell our own solution;" or Two, "I'm not happy about it, I'm building a solution, I'm going to continue to sell that solution."

AstriCon 2008: Digium & Skype announce interoperability collaboration

Doug Mohney — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:22:16 -0400

PHOENIX, Ariz. - Digium and Skype have announced a "collaboration" between the two companies to bring together the Asterisk telephony platform and Skype's service.

Delivering this morning's keynote address at the conference, Skype VP Stefan Oberg said business users utilizing Skype want a PBX to route their calls. The Skype on Asterisk solution will allow PBX users to make calls using Skype names or via normal phone numbers.

The partnership is being touted as bringing together the 338 million worldwide Skype users to the tens of millions of Asterisk users. Since about 30 percent of Skype users are business users, there's a lot of potential to introduce more businesses to Digium and Asterisk.

Currently, the solution is being tested in a private beta; people can apply to participate at www.astricon.net/skype.

Connectivity will be delivered through a channel driver. Licensing will be done on a per channel basis and the software will be a commercial, not open source, license. Pricing will be announced at the time of official release of the product.

On the Skype side, Oberg said businesses will be able to purchase a package to provide some extra support, calling credits and some "additional value-added things." The exact details on how the packaging will work are not yet fully defined. "The details we'll work out together."

The Skype-Asterisk channel driver will support Skype's wideband codec, and Asterisk will have the capability to transcode between Skype's native codecs and other codecs. It will allow users to register as multiple Skype users, so a particular extension can ring to a Skype name. Multiple calls per user are also supported.

Video will not initially be supported, but video in Skype "may encourage" Asterisk to incorporate video support faster, said Digium CTO Mark Spencer.

Channel partners will have built-in discounts for the Skype Asterisk solution, giving them an opportunity to make margin on the piece. Oberg also noted that channel partners will also have the opportunity for a revenue share on Skype calls.

VoIP costs, demand on the rise

Pete Wylie — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:57:45 -0400

VoIP services are now almost twice as expensive per hour as other IT services, but despite the expense, VoIP continues to grow faster than other IT services, according to an OnForce report released today. The report credits large roll-outs of tech products like flat-screen TVs and wireless networks for the increase in demand for services.

The OnFocus report also expressed surprise that VoIP service costs are growing faster than other IT services, even though VoIP is already the most expensive. VoIP services were more than three times as expensive as the lowest-cost IT services, such as point-of-sale and printer and software, according to the report.

For more:
- Phoneplusmag.com digests the OnForce report.

VARs State VoIP Like

Doug Mohney — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:44:10 -0400

Solution providers in the networking market are staking a claim in the VoIP space, with more than 40 percent of recently surveyed providers saying they currently sell VoIP/UC products with almost another 13 percent planning to sell them in the near future. VoIP is also named the fastest growing network technology in the survey.

The survey, conducted by Channel Web, reveals that VoIP is one of the most profitable technology practices out there for VARs, second only to network management. Experience and scale count for a lot in winning business. VoIP adoption is winning over customers due to lower costs and increased productivity, with UC being part of the discussion for increased productivity.

Approximately half say they have included IP video conferencing, IM or collaboration tools in their UC solutions while more than 30 percent have included fixed-mobile convergence.

Microsoft's entry into the VoIP space is causing a mixture of sales opportunities and some confusion in the marketplace. Overall, more than 46 percent of VARs say they expect Microsoft OCS 2007 to open up the SMB market to unified communications solutions and more than a quarter of them say Microsoft's UC portfolio will complement Cisco's, creating opportunities for vendors with feet in both camps.

For more:
- ChannelWeb's VoIP State of Technology article

Related articles:
What finally moves a VAR from legacy to VoIP?
VoIP Most Expensive IT Service

Fonality FACEes certification

Thu, 01 May 2008 06:59:55 -0400

Fonality has announced its very own ecosystem program, the Fonality Authorized Certified Ecosystem (FACE). (Why do I hear Billy Idol singing "Eyes without a Face" now? There's also some John Woo "FACEoff" action here, I'm sure of it).

FACE will certify third-party products for trixbox CE, trixbox Pro and PBXtra; certification validates interoperability with Fonality products and identifies the best components for use. First FACE partners include IP phone manufacturers Aastra and Polycom (no surprise), service provider Bandwidth.com, and hardware partner Sangoma (also not a surprise).

CEO Chris Lyman says the program is necessary to clear up the confusion in the open market, between "questionable" hardware and non-compliant providers. FACE should remove any worries about compliance, making everyone from customers to resellers to Fonality's tech support crew happier.

Fonality's arch-rival Digium relaunched their ecosystem program in October 2007, including offerings for software solutions, training and service provider partners, as well as straightforward compatibility. Are "FACEcon" and "Fonality world" on deck for later announcements this year?

For more:
- FACE Fonality release

Related article:
Fonality rides decentralization

VoIP expected to be good despite global downturn

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:59:55 -0400

Grant Thornton says VoIP growth will continue over the next few years despite a downturn in the global economy. G-T says there should be around $21.5 billion dollars in global VoIP revenues by 2010, with telecom and IT companies fighting over who get it and over 250 million worldwide VoIP subscribers.

Migration from fixed line to mobile and VoIP services is anticipated to increase "exponentially" over the coming years and will result in a "raft" of consolidation in the sector throughout 2008, signaling the death of traditional telephony. G-T cites the doubling of the VoIP subscriber base in 2006 and four fold in the last two years as just one reason for the change.

Large telcos are expected to make strategic acquisitions of independent software developers looking to consolidate their VoIP offerings. Incumbent operators are expected to offset declines in traditional voice revenues and retain customers by grabbing up VoIP software developers. Others snapped up in consolidation may be independent residential and enterprise ISPs and resellers.

Not everything is sunshine. Security remains a major concern, with issues including include quality of service issues, reliability, scalability and the development of industry regulation also potential bumps in the road.

For more:
- Grant Thornton release predicting VoIP Growth in 2008
- ComputerWeekly piece on VoIP Making It Through Downturn

Related articles:
Enterprise VoIP in 2008 an uphill battle
Has the time come for mobile enterprise VoIP?

'Look, Mom--no hands' IP phone autoconfig with new trixbox Pro

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:59:57 -0400

Fonality has rolled out trixbox Pro 2.0, its open source IP PBX software specifically built for resellers. "A lot of the work we do is not very sexy, but it's under the hood work to save resellers time," said Fonality CEO Chris Lyman. "Resellers make a living on margin, how few hours they spend on site for a fixed price contract."

The new trick for trixbox 2.0 is automated phone provisioning. "It's our 'Look, Mom, no hands' feature," Lyman said. "Everyone has been BSing about hands-free provisioning, so I'm calling them to the mat. You can take 100 brand new [IP] phones out of the box, stick them on people's desks, plug them in, and walk away."

Without auto-provisioning, it might take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per desk. Multiply that by 100 phones and there's 25-50 hours of work. "Unless you're making McDonald's rates, you aren't making money, especially if you're changing a fixed rate for the installation … if we can keep chipping away at the time [resellers] spend on site, we have something they can make a living at on here."

Fonality tested a number of other products claiming to have auto-configuration capabilities and ended up writing two separate protocol detection engines to support Aastra and Polycom phones. Each engine uses three different algorithms to identify a new phone plugged into the system. Once a new phone is detected and identified, the appropriate firmware and boot code is downloaded on to the phone along with next available extension number, followed by a reboot of the phone so it comes up with the proper extension number. "Most of the time is spent waiting for the phone to reboot," stated Lyman.

For more:
- TMC comments on new trixbox release

Related articles:
Bosses use Boomerang to find staff
Fonality rides decentralization

“Look Mom – No Hands” IP phone autoconfig with trixbox Pro 2.0

Doug Mohney — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:16:27 -0400

Fonality has rolled out trixbox Pro 2.0, its open source IP PBX software specifically built for resellers. “A lot of the work we do is not very sexy, but it’s under the hood work to save resellers time,” said Fonality CEO Chris Lyman. “Resellers make a living on margin, how few hours they spend on site for a fixed price contract.”

The new trick for trixbox 2.0 is automated phone provisioning. “It’s our ‘Look Mom, No Hands’ feature,” Lyman said. “Everyone has been BSing about hands-free provisioning, so I’m calling them to the mat. You can take 100 brand new [IP] phones out of the box, stick them on people’s desks, plug them in, and walk away.”

Without auto-provisioning, it might take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per desk. Multiple that by 100 phones and there’s 20 hours of work. “Unless you’re making McDonald’s rates, you aren’t making money, especially if you’re changing a fixed rate for the installation… if we can keep chipping away at the time [resellers] spend on site, we have something they can make a living at on here.”

Fonality tested a number of other products claiming to have auto-configuration capabilities and ended up writing two separate protocol detection engines to support Aastra and Polycom phones. Each engine uses three different algorithms to identify a new phone plugged into the system. Once a new phone is detected and identified, the appropriate firmware and bootcode is downloaded on to the phone along with next available extension number, followed by a reboot of the phone so it comes up with the proper extension number. “Most of the time is spent waiting for the phone to reboot,” stated Lyman.

Related articles:
Bosses use Boomerang to find staff
Fonality rides decentralization