Thursday, February 24, 2011

The Hosted PBX Heats Up

Parallels Intros Cloud Infrastructure, Hosted PBX and APS-based Services.

"Web hosting software provider Parallels announced on Wednesday at Parallels Summit 2011 it has introduced new strategic cloud infrastructure and hosted PBX solutions, as well as support for Microsoft Office 365 Syndication and Hyper-V Cloud."

That's a big hosting platform player jumping into to VoIP. This following Intermedia's move months ago to start selling Hosted PBX. It's interesting that so many Hosting companies think that selling Voice as App on top of a shared web hosting account will be easy. It seems easy to many but if you look at Speakeasy, RingCentral and Packet8, they have spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on website development, website design, SEO and PPC campaigns. (BTW, these are four separate and distinct components of an e-commerce site.)

So everyone is jumping into Cloud and Cloud Comm, but how do you deploy, support, fulfill, and more importantly sell Hosted PBX to scale. (Scale is having enough sales to self-sustain the product and make a profit). Most of the cloud comm providers are struggling to hit scale. So how's Alligator Hosting or Acme Blue Hosting going to sell it? One or 2 lines at a time a la Vonage back in the day?

If you are selling Cloud or cloud comm, do you have a page like this on your website? HERE.

Cox and Comcast ....

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