Nice post by Rich from TMC/ITEXPO today about how the premise PBX - the main revenue of MITEL, Shoretel, Avaya, Toshiba, Zultys and several others - is being squeezed by at least 4 factors - open source, Microsoft, Cisco and cloud. Rich sees more of the Enterprise market than I do.
I can tell you that Enterprise is adopting and talking about Lync. I mean they get it included in Office365. I would never use it as a PBX replacement but then I'm not a CIO at a Fortune 5000 or Private 5000 or Global 5000 company. Yet each roll out is 10K plus seats - most cloud PBX providers would kill for an average of half that!
You will need to have a story about Why Your PBX solution instead of Microsoft, instead of Cisco, instead of Lync. (3 stories, go!)
And you will need to be able to explain why not just use FreePBX or Asterisk…. For those of you using Asterisk of FreePBX under the hood, that will be a tough one.
For some of you, this will be a challenging exercise, but that is good. It will make you think. It will make you examine your own offering. It will help you flesh out your message to your marketplace. Take the time - set an appointment with some of your staff - to do this exercise. (No appointment, not likely to get done.)
And if it too hard to craft the message, talk to some customers. If it is still hard, add something to the offering to make it stand out.
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