Business VoIP

Intelliverse provides communications services for the enterprise, wholesale and small and medium business market sectors. Intelliverse creates industry-specific communications solutions by aligning sets of technology-based applications around specific business dynamics.

 

Frank Paterno is vice president of Marketing for Intelliverse. I spoke to Paterno about several trends that are driving the IP communications industry forward as well as some of the brightest spots ahead for Intelliverse in 2008.

 

 

FP: People are using social networking sites for legitimate business purposes; due to PDAs, e-mail is becoming as instantaneous as live calling; everyone can be reached via mobile phone — regardless of age or technological experience; business communications is just starting to get more personal once again.

 

FP: No, at Intelliverse, we expected to see a much greater penetration of hosted VoIP services in small businesses during 2007. Instead, we experienced a great deal of interest from the user community and spent a good part of the year educating customers and their buying agents about hosted VoIP services. Those customers that did choose to purchase services opted for trunk replacement services making the experience to the end user transparent. We were anticipating that at larger portion of small business customers would implement a true hosted VoIP solution with IP phones on the desktop enabling them to take advantage of the PBX features that extend beyond the walls of the main office.

 

FP: Yes. With the amount of interest and education that we did in 2007, we are expecting to realize the pay-off in 2008. Also, we reorganized our product suite so that a customer can choose to take technology at their own pace. In a utopian world, we would remain steadfast on a pure hosted VoIP solution, knowing that this solution and architecture will be the standard eventually. However, being in business we must remain practical and while we are preaching what a customer should be using, we also must offer and sell the services that the customers are demanding. As such, we have introduced a SIP trunking product allowing small business to save money on their recurring telco costs while dipping their toe into the VoIP pond. Also, we have unbundled many of the features that we found to be of particular use to a customer and made these available as stand alone products. These products include Automated Receptionist, One Number, Softphone, and Voice/Fax to Email.

 

Using this building block strategy, Intelliverse is positioned to provide customers just the amount of features/technology with which they are comfortable while at the same time, enhancing and continuing to promote our comprehensive flagship hosted VoIP solution.

 

FP: When looking at market adoption of technology and what has been the most successful, clearly wireless technologies take first place. Wireless technology can be seen in the seemingly endless growth of the mobile phone market, the morphing of mobile phone with mobile desktop with PDA products, and the freedom from wires at the desktop brought on by wireless networking solutions. These technologies have helped the market realize that a phone is not synonymous with a physical location as it had been for the first 80 years of its existence. The portability of numbers, drastic change in revenue streams related to phone calls, and combination of services into “phones” have stretched the mind of the consumer. However, adoption of these services tells us that the consumer is keeping up and willing to pay for such technologies. The next stage we are entering is taking this merge of services and redefinition of paradigms to the landline phone. What is unknown is whether traditional landline phones will simply be upgraded to landline IP devices or whether a huge redefining will occur as landline and mobile phones unite to result in a single all around communications device.

 

FP: Beyond the technology community, Skype has had the most impact in the international calling portion of the telecom market. Skype’s success has showed people that calling around the world is not an activity that needs to be priced at a premium. In a very practical sense, this has forced the telecommunications carriers to lower prices and thereby reduce margins on international calling- one of the last call types where high per minute margins remained. In a more philosophical sense, the market has provided more economical services allowing people around the globe to communicate more frequently and without the worry of high phone bills.

 

FW: Apple is currently enjoying a time in the sun with the consumer and therefore, technology that they choose to introduce is received with a bit more excitement and trust than other companies. With the huge success of the iPhone, Apple has taken this respect and proven they also deserve it in the telecommunications space. (for years, we all have been preaching and offering Unified Messaging — Apple puts a feature called Visual Voicemail on the iPhone and the whole world think they invented it!) So far, Apple’s impact on telecom has been to stylize the PDA and provide an unparalleled user experience with the device. However, Apples has a tremendous power to further influence the telecom market in greater ways over the coming years. Once they exhaust the mobile phone market, perhaps they will continue with a PC based softphone. iTunes started simply as a client to manage music on a Mac but has become the app of choice for music management on PCs and Macs alike. Can Apple take their user experience expertise and apply it to user-managed telephony services like hosted VoIP?

 

FP: Our partnerships and integrations with broadband providers allow us to offer a hosted VoIP service that does not get brought down by the unpredictable nature of the internet. Because traditional telephony was dedicated and private at its core, the market has very little tolerance for bad quality and unreliability. Therefore, the strength of our network at the core and the interop with bandwidth providers provides reliability that we can guarantee and monitor from end to end.

 

FP: The Bell companies. They have been very quiet over the past year with regards to VoIP. Although a merger between a Bell and a VoIP technology company like Vonage could take years to sort out, the result would be a company and an offering that would be very difficult with which to compete.

 

FP: Attendees to my session will learn our perspective on the future of IP communications. Our approach to future trends is typically more technologically conservative in favor of presenting and discussing practical trends that will help put services in the hands of users immediately. Whereas it may be fun to dream about space-age communications trends, it is more useful to discuss the short term trends that can help those on the front line of our industry to understand how to communicate benefits to potential users. I will discuss the continuing trends towards mobile communications, trends in the ways which today’s business and business people operate, and the trend to reintroduce a personal aspect back into communications. Many of our recent communications trends (computers, email, Internet) have made communication less personal- that is less reliant on discussion between persons. Recently, communications have begun to get more personal again with social networking tools, video calling, and easier group collaboration solutions.

 

FP: Product Managers, Marketers, Salespersons that are involved in the communications industry.

 

FP: I will offer the perspective of an organization that has understood and served the communication needs of large corporate organizations for 20 years. Using VoIP technology, we now are able to use what we know from the large corporate world and apply it to the small business marketplace. This perspective gives us a proven background in knowing what features and habits people use to communicate professionally.

 

FP: The merging of wireless and wireline services.

 

FP: Vonage will get bought by Verizon (News - Alert).