Re-Defining Business VoIP

TMCnet

Hosted VoIP is so last season. In style now are telephony-in-the-cloud services, communications-enabled business processes and managed service providers.

Don’t think basic PBX, darling. The new trend is all about outfitting businesses with communications solutions that offer presence, can allow today’s worker to go from wireline to wireless in a flash, and have hooks into popular business applications.

“Hosted business VoIP is not very descriptive. I prefer telephony from the cloud because that’s what we’re really talking about here,” says Bill Bumbernick, CEO of service provider Alteva. “VoIP today is just one component of many things that are coming together to create communications.”

Bumbernick adds that a communications-enabled business process could have email, text and/or telephone.

“And all of this stuff is to create efficiencies in business,” he says. “The cloud or the hosted part of this is what creates the rapid development – the ability to rapidly move that capability into businesses.”

David Zwicker, vice president of marketing at Whaleback Systems says his company considers itself a managed service provider and fits somewhere between the two options of buying a PBX from Ayava, Cisco orShoreTel and using IP Centrex.

Hosted business VoIP sounds like it is purely Internet-based, meaning “best effort,” Zwicker says, and Whaleback is certainly not that.

“We don’t want any part of that association,” he adds.

Rather, Whaleback provides QoS through intelligence in the PBX, intelligence in the network operations center, and control over the gateway where the IP-PSTN handoff takes place. Additionally, he says, Whaleback provides a dedicated pipe for voice traffic.

As part of its service, Whaleback handles installation; cuts a deal for access connectivity, which could be for a T1, DSL, cable modem service or whatever is the best option in the customer’s area; provisions the bandwidth needed for the customer’s applications; and maps how those calls will move over the network so it can control the call paths, says Zwicker.

Whaleback, which supports CrystalBlue Voice using its own server-based PBX, aims its collection of products and services at customers with five to 500 employees, he says. But Whaleback considers businesses in the 15 to 99 employee space as its sweet spot because they tend to be too big for key systems and too small for traditional enterprise-class PBXs.

Customers today are looking for alternatives to expensive PBX purchases because of the economy and because they just don’t want to put a lot of capital into these systems, says Zwicker. Hosted VoIP is an option, but a problematic one, he says, because it risks service quality and can limit feature functionality. But a managed service in which Whaleback provides the hosted PBX systems, the management of it and the connectivity packaged in “a nice, predicable, flat-rate” setup is a more attractive offer, he says.

Cellphone Users in U.S., Canada, Spain Pay Most

Story by The Wall Street Journal

Consumers in the U.S., Canada and Spain have among the highest mobile phone bills in the world, according to an OECD report, which also reveals that people are increasingly ditching land lines in favor of using only cellphones.

The new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which surveyed its 30 member countries, says that revenue for business voip services and mobile-phones is on the rise, despite the global recession.

Mobile phones are steadily becoming cheaper to use, and service is more readily available. Still, there are glaring differences in prices and usage around the world. In Europe, mobile phone service is generally cheaper than in the U.S. Users in northern Europe, especially Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands, pay the least for their mobile phones, and are therefore increasingly substituting their land lines with cellphones.

One of the reasons Canada and the U.S. are such expensive markets for mobile users is that, unlike in Europe, consumers in North America often pay to receive calls.

One European country that bucks the low-price trend is Spain. Buying a phone or a SIM card aren't particularly pricey, but usage is very expensive.

It is very difficult to compare the different types of plans in different countries.

Mexico, one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in the countries surveyed, still has the second-lowest mobile market penetration rate on the list. Slightly more than 60 out of every 100 people in Mexico own a cellphone. The lowest mobile-phone penetration of any OECD country is Canada.

Italy is the country where the most mobile phones are used, with 150 mobile subscribers for every 100 residents. People have multiple accounts, multiple SIM cards, and multiple phones.

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Is Hosted VoIP Ready For Enterprise Customers?

Story from TMC Net

Hosted VoIP solutions fall broadly into two categories:

a) Basic (SIP) trunking with minimal features

b) Full-featured hosted PBX phone systems or hosted Centrex.

According to AMI Partners, these services have grown quite significantly over the past few years with the number of seats deployed increasing from 394,000 seats in 2006 to 3,000,000 seats by 2010. However, virtually all of these seats are deployed in small or medium sized businesses. To a large extent, enterprise customers have not adopted hosted VoIP services. Why is this, and is the time right for them to do so now?

There are a number of reasons why larger enterprise customers have not adopted hosted VoIP to the same extent as the SMBs. First, there is an inherent inertia inside a large business driven by the mindset that only PSTN trunks can provide the kind of quality and reliability demanded by the users (and most importantly the CEO). The fear of the unknown and resistance to change is palpable; no one is going to get fired for installing a new AT&T PRI trunk, but they might get fired if they install a new (unknown and scary) hosted VoIP service! Secondly there are some genuine concerns about the real availability of the services, the end to end QOS and even the viability of some of the new service providers.

So, has the time come for enterprise to move to hosted business VoIP services?

Clearly, times have changed from just a year ago. We are in the depths of a deep, worldwide recession and almost all businesses, especially large enterprises, are feeling significant pain. No longer can they accept the status quo; they must look for ways to cut costs and become more efficient. For hosted VoIP providers, this is an opportunity that had not previously been afforded. But just cutting costs is not going to win an enterprise contract as the genuine concerns outlined above must be addressed. Let’s look at these in more detail:

a) Scalability. Is the system scalable for large enterprise? How can this be shown? Are simulated results good enough or is an enterprise deployment needed before you can win one (chicken and the egg problem)?
b) Availability and reliability. Does an enterprise really need five 9’s? Is four 9’s sufficient based upon the reduced costs and the ability to route calls elsewhere in the instance of an IP network failure issue, for example?

c) Manageability. Is the system manageable for many thousands of extensions? For example, the interface to manage 100 extensions may not be adequate for managing 10,000 extensions.
d) Quality. Most enterprises are probably not going to rely on a single IP connection for both voice and data (though with the availability of MPLS circuits and guarantees of QOS from the access provider and the VoIP service provider, there is certainly no reason not to finally merge the two), so the VoIP service provider needs to guarantee some level of QOS based upon a Layer 2 or private peered arrangement with the access provider (assuming they are not one and the same). Voice quality can actually be improved over the PSTN with the deployment of wide-band codecs or “HD voice” as it is sometimes referred to.

e) Security. Are security-conscious enterprises going to allow un-encrypted voice over a public Internet phone system? Probably not, so a plan for encrypted authentication and encrypted voice will likely be needed in any enterprise proposal.
f) Viability. Is a $100B (or maybe $10B nowadays) enterprise going to trust its mission critical phone services to an unprofitable, cash poor service provider? Any smaller service provider will have to make a case that it is just as viable (or even more so) as the customer’s previous vendors. With the recent bankruptcy of Nortel, perhaps this case isn’t so hard to make?

In conclusion, the time is ripe for service providers with products and services that can meet the criteria described above to market to enterprise customers. In all likelihood, SIP trunking will make the first inroads, as this is the least disruptive to the enterprise and any installation can be quickly reversed if problems are encountered. But enterprise is also ready for penetration by hosted PBX and hosted IP Centrex, especially if they have not already invested in an enterprise IP-PBX or are looking for integration with multiple smaller branch offices. The cloud of recession could indeed have a silver lining for our industry. IT