Business VoIP

With today’s slower economy and uncertainty about the direction Washington, D.C. will take issues such as income tax for businesses, pending this year’s presidential election, it’s as important as it’s ever been to manage telecom expenses.

 

Serving customers, not managing IT infrastructure, is a priority for SMBs who lack support staff.

 

One expert in this area, Jeff Silbert, vice president of channels and alliances at M5 Networks (News - Alert), a business-to-business VoIP system provider, is joining a panel of experts next week to discuss the basics of voice and data solutions. During “SMB VoIP Options” at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles, Sept. 16 to 18, Silbert and others will talk about hosted versus non-hosted voice, and how to select the right solution for your business.

 

I recently put some questions to Jeff about his company, what we can expect from it and got some fairly surprising answers – including one about New York Jets quarterback Brett Favre playing in this season’s Superbowl. Maybe not quite so surprising after seeing Favre complete that fourth-and-13 touchdown pass.

 

In any case, our back-and-forth follows. Enjoy it.

 

 

JS: End-to-end solutions that are iPod-easy and TiVo-easy that enable our clients to measure and therefore improve what’s important to them – for example, sales, image and marketing.

 

 

JS: Continuing to build a company that can deliver quantifiable business impact for our clients – for instance, Sales Engine which acts as a leading indicator of who will make a quota and who won’t.

 

 

JS: Similar to the software market, the communications market will continually evolve to as a service and away from premise-based solutions where, unfortunately, the goal has been just to get the stuff to work. Businesses deserve more.

 

 

JS: First, Apple’s (News - Alert) iphone. Also, Cisco with WebEx/Telepresence, especially as the trend continues with higher airlines and gas prices. Third, SalesForce with Force.com – they have also done a great job of enabling CRM – Phone System integration. For example, it enables M5’s mid-size business clients who use Google (News - Alert) to track the effectiveness of call-throughs the same way they track click-throughs today.

 

 

JS: Not only what you measure you improves, but the company that is best in helping you measure it can dominate their market – even if they’re not first, second, or third at developing the original concept.

 

 

JS: People and businesses will gladly pay a premium and even wait in line for an elegantly designed solution.

 

 

JS: Motorola 9qm. Verizon (News - Alert) still works best in my neighborhood.

 

 

JS: Microsoft (News - Alert) and Apple will be the long-term winners.

 

 

JS: The industry will be well on the road to the extinction of the premise-based phone system. Voice will be just like any other software application.

 

 

JS: How Voice as a Service can deliver measurable business impact for businesses

 

 

JS: Anybody interested in how the communications business will evolve.

 

 

JS: If phone calls are important to your business, it is worth a conversation with M5 to see if we can deliver business impact in one of 10 areas.

 

 

JS: Brett Favre will be playing on February 1^st,  2009. Who would have guessed Eli Manning for 2008? I am from New York. What did you expect?