Featured Articles from IP Phones

VoIP service providers are faced with an extremely competitive landscape, which forces differentiation in the form of unique offers, innovation or rock bottom pricing. For IP phone or conferencing vendors, they are seeing a trickle-down effect, where they too must come up with unique ways to offer products and add value to communications investment.

This week, Polycom (News - Alert) unveiled the Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) pilot program providing end users and service providers more pocket-friendly pricing as well as greater flexibility in implementing Polycom IP endpoints.

“Polycom’s DaaS program removes the uncertainty that comes with predicting how much equipment customers will buy in the future,” said Doug Funsch, Chief Revenue Officer of Impact Telecom, a cloud communications company and service provider partner of Polycom. “Customers will appreciate that we can offer the highest-quality phones to them, while being the single point of contact with phone and services included in a single monthly payment.”

The DaaS program runs month to month, so customers have the option to cancel at any time with no penalty. In addition, the program also offers a replacement plan that allows users to exchange an IP phone if it fails at any point within seven years.

Service providers can relish in a greatly reduced upfront investment, and companies choosing to dabble in DaaS gain the improved predictability in annual costs as well as improved flexibility as a result of the monthly model.  

“Customers have told us that they want greater flexibility and control while still keeping up to date on their phone technology,” said Chris Thorson, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Polycom. “Our DaaS model takes the entire lifecycle into account, from equipment deployment to end-of-life, and removes the onus on business owners and service providers to keep devices current as new models come out.”

The program is currently only available in North America, but I would expect it won’t stay this way for long. DaaS delivers the Polycom RealPresence Trio, the Polycom VVX line of Business Media phones and the legendary Polycom SoundStation IP5000, IP6000 and IP7000 VoIP conference phones – all quite popular endpoints.

What VoIP service provider are you working with?