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comms business
24
•MARKET REPORT –HOSTED TELEPHONY
According to Mat Townend, Managingdirector of illume Consulting, the commsanalyst firm, there were some 613914 hostedtelephony seats deployed in the UK as of January 2011Hosted telephony remains a slightly controversial topic in the channel. The hostedmodel runs against the traditional marginmaking opportunities afforded by the upfrontCPE PBX sale. Nethertheless progress is beingmade by hosted provided no doubt spurredon by the whole ‘Cloud’ thing going onaround them raising the profile of non-premise based solutions. But are thearguments for hosted telephony compelling?
Compelling?
James Palmer, CEO of Nine Telecom Group,asks the question, ‘What has been thecompelling proposition of hosted telephony over the last few years?’ It would seem that theconnectivity gremlins have been sorted outand yes, hosted telephony is more flexiblewhen compared to a more traditional CPEbased solution in applications where there aremultiple company sites or remote workers tomanage. But what is different about hostedtelephony compared to say a PBX systemlocated in a data centre. Looked at that way it’s not a compelling proposition althoughsome would rightly point to the disasterrecovery capabilities.In recent times however there has been alot more talk in the market about hosted orcloud based services and in my opinion thereis more of an upside for applications otherthan telephony; for example, MicrosoftExchange. Here. If the connectivity goes down you can at least get your mail downloaded toa smartphone.I believe that as organisationsprogressively move application to the cloudthen hosted, or cloud based voice services,become much more interesting as part of anoverall bundle of cloud based services – andin this model CPE solutions will find it a lotmore difficult to compete.Hosted or cloud based telephony can bedelivered in a number of ways; from a hostedplatform such as Broadsoft, a PBX in a datacentre, for example, Mitel. We are ourselvesmoving our business over to a Mitel solutionin a data centre to serve four sites andhomeworkers with BT Wholesale SIPconnectivity.I think the real ‘game changer’ for usersand the channel will be when voice servicesbecome integrated with other hosted or cloudbased applications. Research Nine TelecomGroup is undertaking with SMEs in to whatkind of services they want will be revealedlater this summer and we will be impartingour findings initially to our channel partnersso that they are best equipped to grasp theseopportunities.”
Differentiation Advice
Andy Hollingworth, Director or Wholesale atTalkTalk Business has some advice for resellersseeking to differentiate their hosted telephony offerings.“Research we conducted last monthrevealed that 64 per cent of UK SMEs arebeginning to depend more on impersonalmethods of communication such as email,texting and instant messenger services.Although telephone calls and face-to-faceconversations remain integral to business,hosted telephony providers should look totheir offering and understand how it can bebrought in line with the convenient andtargeted nature of less personal methods of communication.Added-value hosted telephony applications – part of the move away from thedeclining minutes market – offer the
Sound Bites
Carl Churchill, Managing Director of DaisyWholesale
“At any given time, we are carrying around400Mbit/s of voice and that’s increasedthreefold over the last couple of years.Ultimately, these developments are as a resultof the notable advances we’ve seen inconnectivity for hosted voice.”
James Passingham at Foehn
“SMEs are definitely moving towards adoptingcloud services. Traditionally, we’ve seenslower uptake on the telephony front as it’snot the first business service that springs tomind when considering moving over to thecloud. But that’s quickly changing.”
Swyx Sales Director, Marco Crueger
“Whilst some of our partners will sell CPE orcloud dependent on the preference of thecustomer, others have already signalled theirintention to take advantage of the cloud as anew way of delivering SwyxWare because it iseasier to manage and maintain because it ishosted centrally.”
Perfect Host
We report on some new market entrants as well asexisting suppliers to see how hosted telephony providersdifferentiate themselves in the market.
 
James Palmer of Nine Telecom Group 
 
comms business
26
•MARKET REPORT –HOSTED TELEPHONY
functionality and flexibility for SMEs to routetheir traffic in-house in alignment with amultilayered IVR, for example. As SMEs turnto convenient communication, the channelcan now offer UK businesses the chance torefine their own call routing and avoid thehassle of undirected call traffic whilstensuring all vital business calls are answered.Savvy resellers are offering clients userfriendly, self-serve solutions that includecontrol over an estate of inbound numbers,statistical analysis and the power to deploy their own call strategy. Large businesses withfrequent calls, multiple sites or one, containedcustomer service team, are ideal targets forthis level of functionality. Our own IntelligentCall Controller allows partners to customise abranded call management web portal for theirclients or for their own operation. As amanaged service, resellers can offer a series of margin-rich services such as singletranslations, call divert plans, ratio plans, fax-to-email, scalable call queuing, hunt groupsand time-of-day routing.Any chance to customise a hostedtelephony offering and achieve true marketstandout should be seriously considered. Theinbound call market is increasingly crowded,with what seems like every provider offeringmodern, multi-functional portals that allowcomms professionals to direct their inboundcall traffic with varying degrees of sophistication. To truly distinguish a portfoliofrom other hosted telephony providers, ourIntelligent Call Engine also allows the channelto API interface directly into our intelligentNext Generation Network. By having this levelof access, partners with the right amount of technical nous can leverage the ultra resilientand robust network to create their own totally bespoke inbound portals and, therefore, achievetotal portfolio ownership without theresponsibility or expense of a separateplatform.”More advice on differentiation comes fromJon Farmer, Entanet’s Voice Technical Lead,who says, “With a well-established productportfolio Entanet has already learned valuablelessons to differentiate its channel proposition.Being a channel focused wholesale provider weunderstand the importance to resellers of beingable to provide VoIP services under their ownbrand. Taking our flagship VoIP Enrich solutionas an example, our partners can provide theservice completely under their own brand withcomprehensive white label documentation;flexible billing options; unbranded technicalsupport; and even a white label managementportal.”Entanet’s partners and their customers areable to manage every aspect of their service inreal time through a secure online managementportal which can also be completely rebrandedas the partner’s own. Farmer explains, “Torebrand the user portal the channel partnersimply uses our partner interface known assynergi, via which they can upload their owncompany logo, contact information, changeevery aspect of the colour scheme and evenupload custom sales messages to be displayed toconvince customers that the portal and serviceis provided solely by them.” Additionally,partners can utilise a comprehensive library of commercial and operational white labeldocumentation and they can choose how they wish to be billed by Entanet. Where the partnerhas the billing capabilities they can choose tobill their customers directly and pay Entanet atwholesale rates. Alternatively, Entanet can billthe end users on the partner’s behalf and attheir set pricing. The partner then generates ahealthy recurring monthly commission.”
Newcomers
Al Athraby, Managing Director, Yoozoom sayshis company has recently launched a uniquechannel strategy in the marketplace where they are creating their own channel with the soleproduct strategy being VirtualPBX and UnifiedCommunications in Hosted environments.“Having spent several months researchingthe marketplace, it became very obvious toYoozoom that we had to pursue a Broadsoftbased VirtualPBX strategy in order to competewith the various carriers and resellers in theUK. In our opinion there is no other Hostedsolution, that can match the features, flexibility and innovation and there is no other providerwho can match Skyrack in terms of thatflexibility and innovation. Skyrack hasconsistently proven that the service works,straight out of the box, on any of ourconnections and their license model andgeneral supply model fits our unique strategy completely. We can buy our equipment fromanywhere we like and the same goes for ourconnectivity; we simply buy licenses andinnovation from Skyrack.As regards making any money, well theproof of that will be born out when we havereached our targets of 500,000 seats in 5 years.We know it’s aggressive, but so are our plans.The new brand of Yoozoom will be one towatch in the industry and thanks to Skyrackand our lucrative partner programme we’re off to a record start.”Elisha Telecom is an accidental player in theHosted Telephony arena as Jeff Green explains,“We created the company back in 2003 toprovide the booming Asian call centre industry with the tools necessary to hit the groundrunning. Being specialists in open sourcetelephony, we installed and developed theapplications needed for BPO companies to
Leon Mangan, head of indirect channel,Siemens Enterprise Communications.
“Several business sectors are emerging asstrong advocates of hosted telephonycommunications, especially the costconscious SMEs. Professional service firmsinherently operate satellite and remoteoperations for a verity of teams and agents,where hosted telephony enables them tomake quick, simple changes from addingusers and locations to attaching additionalunified communication (UC) functions.”
Justin Hamilton-Martin, Managing Directorat 8el
“Interestingly, 8el’s average customer is over100 users and they are targetingorganisations looking for feature reachdeployments, anywhere up to 500 users perorganisation – quite a contrast to the majorityof IP Centrex vendors.”
Jeff Green of Elisha Telecom 
Robin Hayman, Director for Marketing &Product Management at SpliceCom.
“When you talk to Hosted Providers about howphone calls can still be made and received inthe event of the primary IP trunk to the hostingcentre, or cloud, failing, those that do offer asolution will tell you that ‘the call alwayslands. In practice what this means is that allcalls can be directed via the GSM network to amobile phone.”
Fran Fish, Commercial Director, VoxGen
“Long term success is dependent uponmonitoring, tuning and improving the solutionon an on-going basis, to ensure it continuallydelivers. As the market changes and businessgoals alter, providers must ensure thetelephony adapts and evolves with thosechanges, and it is as effective tomorrow as itis today.”
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