Hello all,
Some of you may remember me from my previous thread about this service we have been providing. I promised to update those that are interested when I had some updates. So far so good. I have been at it for about 6 months now and our service has well over 300 users. We recently finished the Microsoft Global Conference (in Minneapolis) where we signed up several new dealers. You might be surprised at the number of data guys jumping into telephony, I was. Most of them are pushing Cisco or 3Com.
So far we have only had once cancellation. that was a guy that needed service before we could get it to him. I think the partner promised a delivery date that was a bit unrealistic to deliver on. We let him out before his service even started. Currently we have about 25 partners reselling our service around the U.S. We are going to get that up to 80 and stop there to keep it manageable and to allow our partners to not have a bunch of competition. I have been taking a lot of calls from the Broadsoft and Sylantro dealers asking us if we will wholesale to them. Because 90% of the hosted PBX providers use them, most services you will see are very similar. To my knowledge they don’t have the full functionality that we deliver on our most basic offering. To name a couple...
In and outbound faxing
presence
using the system when away from the IP phone
hosted exchange
In addition, we have been picking up quite a few people coming off of providers that have no kind of QoS guarantee. It takes a while longer to get services rolling but if we bring in the internet will back up our voice quality with a Service Level Agreement. Many other providers have SLA's but that only guarantees uptime, not voice quality. Some of the more popular choices in this industry are Covad (from GoBeam) and MCI. To this date we have not lost a deal to any other hosted provider. The only ones we have lost are to CPE because the customer wants to own their own system. About 50% of customers that have seen a demonstration have closed.
We are getting ready to announce our existence to the Interactive Intelligence channel of partners who know us pretty well. This should be a big success as that this channel needs no introduction to who we are or the reputation we uphold. Explaining this to outsiders has been very difficult. I am looking for ward to the future of this service and of course all of your feedback.
Any questions? Thanks.
bbarnes
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www.itel-ip.com VoIP, with Features Galore
