Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Differentiating VOIP

SimpleSignal has announced a big differentiator: molded to Microsoft Exchange and Voice-enabled.

SimplyMobile translates e-mail from text to speech and allows users to call Outlook contacts via voice commands on a mobile phone. Users can change the time of a meeting in their calendar verbally and Exchange will send an e-mail notification of the change to the meeting participants.

As I was explaining to a client last week, Hosted PBX will have to be married to email (specifically a Hosted Exchange type product). Why? Email and Voice are combining on mobile handsets and on laptops and on PC's.

Another reason is because to sell VOIP, you need to manage the network so you should be providing and managing the Internet, the router, the phones, the email, back-up/archiving, the Address Book, voicemail, and the digital voice service. Hosted PBX = Managed Services.

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