Monday, October 02, 2006

Linksys One & CP

VoIP Weekly has an article about CommPartners becoming a Linksys One VoIP Provider. Since all Linksys VARs will be able to sell CommPartners voice services, the market is tweaked again. Obviously, the Small Biz market (up to 16 users in this case) requires feet-on-the-street or shoe-leather marketing; that is why Linksys realized utilizing the VAR channel would be the way to get those feet on the street. CommPartners isn't the only Linksys One VoIP Provider, Cbeyond, RNKVoIP and Primus (huh?) are as well.

Now VoIP providers have to worry about the Linksys One channel threat as well as the Microsoft LCS channel. Here are some ideas for a VoIP Provider :

  • a complete package (soup to nuts)
  • simple Install
  • ease of use
  • effortless M/A/C
  • ring tones
  • POTS call quality
  • For Marketing, you will need a WOW or a Purple Cow
  • For Sales, you will need feet-on-the-street = some kind of channel / VAR
  • these are remarkable any more: VPN; monitoring; disaster recovery; Convergence.
  • Borrow an idea from SmoothStone, dial 5150 from any SmoothStone enabled phone and you get the Help Desk.
  • Some WOW ideas pertaining to the Aastra 480i might be to enable Video Conferencing on the screen like Cisco or RSS feeds or address book
  • Call recording as an mp3 or wav file (podcasting) ANDn the ability to email it & VoiceMail to anyone

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