Customers :: VoIP Biz-News.com

Number of results 12 for Customers

12/09/2011 - National Institutes of Health seek RFI for major Unified Communications project

The federal government is making a concentrated effort to cut its communications costs, looking to unified communications solutions, VoIP and a variety of web, voice and video collaboration solutions to hulp it cut billions from its budgets.

This week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued an RFI to help it evaluate unified communications tools and products to add to the NIH Enterprise Architecture and enterprise standard technologies.

The NIH, which consists of 27 different institutes and centers, said it currently uses a mix of different vendors and technologies to provide communications capabilities to its staff. Some of these capabilities are provided by a staff member's local institute or center, while other capabilities are provided centrally by the NIH. These technologies are generally not unified. It said each has their own unified communications requirements.

"While recognizing that no one technology would be appropriate for the NIH (at this time)," the NIH RFI said, "we are looking for unified communications technologies that would work well within this diverse environment and be able to integrate well with a wide variety of legacy systems."

The NIH specifically is looking at voice and telephony products; voice, video and web conferencing; and email, voice mail and unified messaging.

The NIH laid out the scope of this technical domain as products (equipment, software and services) that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods including Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, e-mail, audioconferencing and Web conferencing, videoconferencing, voice mail, unified messaging (UM), instant messaging (IM) and various forms of mobility.

Evaluation criteria include:

Estimated total cost of ownership
NIH experience with the technology and the use and adoption of the standard throughout NIH
Fit with existing NIH standards, technologies, and systems
The breadth of the standard's applicability to multiple NIH stakeholder classes
The level of effort and complexity associated with the implementation of the product in a production environment
The use and adoption of the standard throughout industry in general (both commercial and public enterprises)
The effort and specialized skill sets required to support a technology
The product life cycle
The ability and/or effectiveness and fit of the technology within the NIH security environment
Strategic value/features and functionality
The health of the product vendor in terms of its stability, projected longevity, and likelihood it will exist in the future to support the product and later versions of the product.

For more:
- see the NIH RFI

08/02/2010 - Google to release enterprise Voice in 2010

Google's Enterprise President Dave Girouard explained in an interview with eWeek that Google has been building on its business app suite and will launch an enterprise version of Google Voice later this year--a combination of applications that may prove disruptive to the Unified Communications (UC) market. With Google's cloud based applications highly collaborative already, and with the combination of Google Voice, Talk, and Gizmo5, Google has the makings of a unified communications app bundle that could be as cheap, easy to use and ubiquitous as its search engine and email offerings.

Later this year, Girouard said, Google would release a version of Google Voice for businesses, but he did not go into specifics about a timeline. At the moment, Google Voice has 1.4 million users routing calls through the service. Currently, Google Apps has 2 million business customers paying only $50 per user a year to use the software suite. As Google continues to develop and launch its VoIP play, they will have a built-in business audience to offer their services.

For more:
- read this article

28/09/2009 - Junction Networks adds UC features to OnSIP

Junction Networks, a business and hosted VoIP provider targeting the SMB market, announced the addition of IM, presence and phone to its browser-based telephony offering OnSIP. The new offering, called my.OnSIP, monitors whether contacts on the hosted IP-PBX are available and provides enterprise-only IM to reduce distractions.

The new capabilities are available for any user on the hosted platform, including distributed employees, according to Junction.

Junction said its business customers need only provide IP phones, and it handles the rest of the networking. The company is also opening the new client to developers who would like to integrate these functions into applications for real-time communications.

"True, some on-premise PBX vendors offer chat, presence, and maybe even phone status," Junction Networks' President Robert Wolpov said to Voxilla. "But they often charge considerably extra for these non-voice media, and they often require proprietary phone sets."

The company said the new features will be added at no extra charge to the OnSIP hosted service, which begins at $39.95 per month, according to Voxilla.

For more:
- see the Voxilla article here
- see the Junction press release here

24/09/2009 - Where is Skype going with its business play?

Skype is aggressively targeting the small to medium-sized business market with its Skype for SIP offering. As Om Malik points out, Skype's announcement of interoperability with Cisco's widely deployed Unified Communications 500 system is indicative of a larger move by the company to attempt to win significant share in the business telephony market, as it has done in the consumer space.

Skype, which has already announced interoperability with ShoreTel and SIPfoundry sipXecs, offers businesses a clear value proposition with its cheap international calling, its free Skype-to-Skype calls, and its video chat options. But Malik says that's about the only thing Skype has over competitive offerings, and hinted that the VoIP calling service needed to add features and improve reliability to overcome negative initial reaction to the Skype for SIP product.

With voice becoming increasingly commoditized, Skype has to see the writing on the wall for the margins of its consumer VoIP offering. While it needs its gigantic 480 million-strong user base to attract business customers via scale and to deliver cost savings from call volume economy, the price it can charge for SkypeIn and SkypeOut minutes will continue to decrease, especially as new, powerful entrants like Google undercut Skype on price.

Enter the Skype enterprise play, which if developed correctly, could begin to deliver recurring revenue to offset any decline in the consumer business. If, of course, it can overcome its stigma as being too unreliable and a pure "value" play.

Skype also announced this week that it will offer a Skype Service Partner Program to begin a concerted channel play. Skype Chief Strategy Officer Christopher Dean said the influence of channel advisors and consultants made a channel offering crucial to Skype's play in enterprise.

"Saving money is just the start of what we do for customers," Dean told PhonePlus. "Skype is much more than voice."

Skype will have to prove that its business offering is indeed more than voice to experience significant uptake and the revenue that would follow. But as its overwhelming success in gaining consumer adoption has shown, a bet against the company should be made with caution.

- Pete

09/09/2009 - ShoreTel first to get Skype for SIP

ShoreTel will serve as Skype's first partner in its Skype for SIP play, which will try to take share in the SMB market. ShoreTel's 11,000 enterprise customers now can sign up for a beta version of the Skype for SIP offering, which allows incoming Skype calls to be routed over a company's PBX and allows outbound calls to be made at normal Skype rates.

Skype is hoping the cost savings from being able to make Skype calls into and out from small businesses will open a new revenue stream in this market, where it has yet to develop significant traction. Since the test program is free of any up-front charges, it is likely to see good trial numbers as small enterprises search for ways to save money during the recession. The companies did not announce what sort of incentive ShoreTel received from Skype to facilitate the arrangement, but access to Skype's more than 400 million customers certainly didn't hurt matters.

For more:
- see the GigaOm article on the announcement here

27/08/2009 - Verizon Business rolls out IP IVR as hosted service

Verizon Business announced this week a new IP-based interactive voice response product based on a Nuance Communications' offering that will provide improved speech recognition capabilities to Verizon Business customers currently using its hosted TDM IVR service. Verizon told Telephony that the new offering allows applications to leverage the speech recognition of the platform to access caller history and information. If the caller requests an agent, the system uses SIP trunking to connect them, or uses the legacy TDM system if the IP network is overloaded.

Verizon said the new hosted offering allows customers to migrate to an IP environment gradually, as they transition back-end systems and workforce to the new platform.

For more:
- see the Telephony article here

29/07/2009 - Telesphere buys Unity's VoIP assets

Fresh off raising a $15 million round of venture funding, business VoIP provider Telesphere announced it has purchased the VoIP services business of Unity Business Networks, which operates in Colorado, Orgeon and Minnesota. While financial terms were not disclosed, a Telesphere spokesman said the deal was worth several million dollars and expands Telesphere's operations to all 50 U.S. states. He also claimed the acquisition makes Telesphere the 3^rd largest provider of hosted VoIP services in the U.S.

"This acquisition roughly doubles the marketplace for Telesphere," said Jeff Kagan, a telecom industry analyst based in Atlanta. "Telesphere is becoming a fast-growing IP phone and Internet service provider aimed at the Hosted VoIP and Managed IP PBX marketplace for business customers."

The transaction is expected to close either in the third or fourth quarter this year.

For more:
- see the press release here

16/07/2009 - IntelePeer expanding Sonus-based network

IntelePeer, a hosted "Communications-as-a-Service" provider, announced it is expanding its Sonus Networks-based network to handle rapidly increasing IP traffic. IntelePeer said it first deployed Sonus gear in 2006, when the bulk of its peering traffic was still TDM.

Phillip Bronsdon, senior vice president of engineering for IntelePeer, said 60 percent of the traffic it handles is now IP voice communications and Sonus was the perfect fit to help IntelePeer grow to meet the increased traffic.

Bronsdon said Sonus is "a platinum player in VoIP" and the company's clear vision to be a serious player in the industry was a major factor in selecting Sonus as a partner. He also said that Sonus had introduced IntelePeer to several future carrier customers and maintained a strong technology roadmap with SIP, video and IMS.

Shailin Sehgal, vice president of product management for Sonus, said his company's flexibility in handling both TDM and IP traffic made it a good fit for firms such as IntelePeer. Sehgal said IntelePeer's deployment, which uses several Sonus products, is a good demonstration of Sonus's ability to deploy an end-to-end solution to ensure high-quality IP communications for its partners.

For more:
- see the press release here

04/05/2009 - Cable wants business(es)

Looking to leverage their investments in VoIP and broadband services, cable companies see growth from business as the next growth opportunity - and doubly so since revenue from consumer households is flat.

Comcast is looking to generate $2.5 billion annually from business services within a few years. Reporting Q1 2009 numbers last week, Comcast increased business service revenues 47 percent in the quarter to $176 million and describes the segment as "growing nicely."

Cox has said it wants to get up to $1 billion of commercial revenue this year. Cablevision has previously said that it expects its high-speed DOCSIS 3.0 services to get more traction with small businesses than residential customers.

For more:
- GigaOm piece recapping Comcast and Cablevison comments. Post.

19/04/2009 - Migration to business VoIP faces customer inertia

Cable operators are encountering customer inertia when it comes to getting business to move from existing services onto hosted VoIP service that provide more features and potentially lower total operating costs. Changing phone providers and hardware, as well as the reluctance to throw out a perfectly functional phone switch are significant hurdles.

Switching service providers and hardware is described as a "monumental hassle" for businesses of all sizes, says Multichannel News, with one softswitch vendor commenting that the competitor for new services isn't "'the other guy' - it's the status quo."

With IP being where the commercial voice market is heading, cable providers are working the hosted VoIP services angle to gain an edge on incumbent providers. Cox Business is leveraging BroadSoft's platform for its VoiceManager service to deliver bells and whistles such as automated attendant, web access to voice mail and find me/follow me services. Cablevision Systems Optimum Lightpath is offering a voice and data bundled service that includes the cost of CPE, such as phones and routers, into the monthly cost, looking for customers willing to spend between $30 to $40 per month per employee on voice and data.

NPRG puts the total market for business communications services at $110 billion in 2008, with hosted IP voice accounting for around $16 billion or so - leaving plenty of room for growth moving forward.

For more:
- Multichannel News discusses the challenges cable provider find in business VoIP. Article.

10/12/2008 - Voxeo buys VoiceObjects

Voxeo accomplished multiple goals in acquiring VoiceObjects, the second company it has bought this year. More acquisitions are expected throughout 2009.

By purchasing VoiceObjects, Voxeo has acquired middleware to enable carrier-grade deployments of over-the-phone self-service apps that are easier and cheaper to deploy - and enable personalization to each caller. There's also a phone self-service analytics package for measuring performance that also allows non-technical staff members to make updates and changes.

VoiceObjects also brings a large European and mobile carrier footprint to Voxeo; Orange, O2 and Vodafone are all VoiceObjects customers, not to mention a bunch of enterprise customers including Adobe, Citibank, Hershey, IKEA, Kellogg, SAP and Volkswagen.

Open standards also play a role in this story. Voxeo and VoiceObjects are big users and advocates of VoiceXML, and it is likely Voxeo's future acquisitions will use VoiceXML to build their solutions. The combined company will continue to enhance the VoiceObjects platforms and launch several new VoiceObjects-based products and services in 2009.

Employee-owned, Voxeo said it has logged twenty consecutive quarters of profitable operations, while sustaining an average yearly revenue growth rate exceeding 60 percent. It's using all that cash to acquire companies, as it has bought four companies in the last four years. Earlier this year, the company bought Beijing-based Micromethod. Voxeo "expects to close additional strategic acquisitions" in 2009.

For more:
- Voxeo talks about buying VoiceObjects. Release.

14/11/2008 - Jamcracker brings SaaS to Telstra

Jamcracker, a SaaS solution company, announced a partnership today with Telstra, Australia's largest telco. Telstra will use Jamcracker's delivery network to expand its IP services portfolio for the SMB market. The Jamcracker applications will be bundled along with Telstra's existing services and branded as "T-Suite." Applications include Microsoft Xchange and McAfee security services.

Jamcracker has compiled a true federated platform that allows users to process applications through Jamcracker's master distribution agreements, according to Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing.

"Our channel-side, private-label marketplaces allow carriers to source from our catalog and resell under their own brand, creating value for both partners," Crawford said. "Telstra is also recruiting local software-as-a-service providers using our integration platform, whose applications can then be resold and integrated into our other partner's platforms through our redistribution services."

Crawford said Jamcracker looks at every distribution partner as a solution partner as well. He said Jamcracker and Telstra's partnership should bring excellent functionality and reliability to small business customers.

All sections | Sections | All articles | News |