Archive for the ‘Business VoIP’ Category
Check out this whitepaper from Speakeasy on the benefits of business VoIP:
Speakeasy Business VoIP is a high-performance, no-maintenance Hosted PBX solution—Now we’re talking.
At
Speakeasy, our whole business is helping small businesses. Speakeasy
Business VoIP works harder and smarter than a traditional phone system
to meet your unique needs. It’s a complete solution that includes your
choice of business class connectivity, employee calling plans, long
distance options, and phones.
New IP Powered Business solutions from Nortel (NYSE: NT) are making it easy for service providers around the world to sell and host pre-tested VoIP services to small and medium sized businesses (SMB). These solutions, announced today at the Fall VON Conference in Boston, combine the latest VoIP technology with planning, installation, management and technical support from Nortel’s portfolio of Global Services for SMBs. They also include marketing support to help service providers target and sell VoIP to the growing SMB market.
"As the world leader in both carrier and enterprise VoIP, Nortel is uniquely positioned to deliver a full-range of simple solutions for SMBs that easily allow carriers to offer advanced IP services without the cost or complexity often associated with next-generation communication services," said Alf Decardenas, general manager, Carrier Multimedia Networks, Nortel. "The needs of SMBs vary dramatically, and as a result, they require VoIP packages that can provide a range of options from fully hosted to onsite IP solutions. Nortel’s new IP Powered Business Solutions can help SMBs deliver big business services like unified communications, integrated multimedia messaging and voice services like Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) with a simple yet powerful IP solution made specifically with the needs of SMBs in mind."
Source: Nortel
Targeting organizations with 30 to 250 phone users, 3Com is introducing the 3Com® VCX™ Connect, an all-in-one platform that delivers Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) software-based IP telephony call control and unified messaging in a single-server package. There are two versions of the product. The VCX Connect 100 delivers high-performance voice capabilities for organizations with 30 to 100 users. The VCX Connect 200 delivers the same robust performance for up to 250 users.
As part of 3Com’s commitment to providing the platform and support for clients to implement best-of-breed Open Source solutions, the company also is launching the 3Com Asterisk Appliance, an Open Source voice-over-IP (VoIP) system based on Digium’s Asterisk Appliance. Designed for five to 30 phone users, it delivers plug-and-play operation right out of the box backed by 3Com’s warranty, service and support. The 3Com Asterisk Appliance works with 3Com’s full line of telephone handsets.
"Small and medium-sized businesses demand flexible and affordable communications solutions to ensure effective collaboration and productivity," said Brian Riggs, research director for Current Analysis’ Enterprise Communications practice. "With these new products, 3Com is bringing enterprise-caliber VoIP communications and applications to organizations of all sizes."
Source: 3Com
In another sign of traditional telephony companies targetting digital communications, Verizon Business announced a voice quality and performance assessment service for VoIP and private IP customers, named Network Assessment with Voice.
In addition, to further support the deployment of VoIP, Verizon Business will provide Private IP customers with an industry-leading service level agreement (SLA) that measures audio clarity.
"As customer demand for VoIP deployment increases, we’re enhancing our Private IP services to help improve the quality of voice traffic," said Mike Marcellin, vice president of product marketing with Verizon Business. "We continue to expand Private IP’s presence and capabilities to help ensure that our customers are able to leverage the benefits of the convergence of voice, data and video applications moving across their global corporate networks."
According to a new study by Access Market International, the market for hosted VoIP solutions targeted at small and medium sized businesses is set to hit US$416 million in North America this year, up from only $165 million two years ago.
“In particular, the small business (SB, or companies with up to 99 employees) segment is forecasted to grow at a spectacular 69% on a cumulative basis for the next 5 years,” says Sanjeev Aggarwal, AMI-Partners’ New York-based Vice President for SMB Infrastructure Solutions. “The concept of hosted VoIP is analogous to software-as-a-service (SaaS) where upstarts like Salesforce.com and NetSuite are gaining rapid adoption. Similarly, the concept of voice communications as a service is becoming very appealing as these small businesses have almost no IT/voice communications expertise and resources.”
The market opportunity for hosted business-VoIP solutions for SMBs is huge and growing rapidly - and so is the competition, which is increasing with participation from traditional telecom and cable companies, equipment vendors, and focused complimentary service providers.
There are many drivers that are influencing SMBs to adopt hosted business-VoIP, including predictable monthly voice communications expenses with no up-front capital expense, toll savings for intra- and inter-company long-distance and local calling. “Simple, secure, very reliable, easy-to-use solutions supporting unified messaging and mobility are key for small businesses that never want to miss a customer call,” Mr. Aggarwal says. “Helping SBs appear more professional and larger, especially SBs that have a store presence and web presence.”
Source: AMI Partners
Verizon Business ranks first in overall strategy for voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), according to a recently released Forrester Research study.
The study, "Forrester Wave(TM): US Enterprise-Class VoIP Services, Q1 2007," found that "Verizon Business is best in class on overall voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) strategy, leading others on technology strategy, planned performance and customer service enhancements, and price."
The findings are particularly significant since businesses are increasingly seeking help transitioning from traditional telecommunications services to IP communications.
"This recognition reinforces our strong performance in this emerging growth area of the telecommunications market," said Tom Roche, vice president of marketing for network voice and data services with Verizon Business. "Verizon Business’ expansive global IP network and comprehensive suite of VoIP services enable our customers to make the move to VoIP and leverage IP communications to achieve their specific business goals at their own path and pace."
According to the Forrester Wave(TM) report, Verizon Business "offers the broadest portfolio of VoIP services; this provider is the only one among its peers to offer session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking, hosted VoIP services, managed IP private branch exchange (PBX) services, IP conferencing, IP toll free, and hosted IP contact center services today. Verizon Business leads its peers on VoIP reliability, scalability, and sales capabilities."
Via GigaOm:
Fixed mobile convergence, the merger of wired and wireless networks, is a topic that always seems to top the list of telecom trends every year. T-Mobile made the topic interesting last year when it started a service for consumers in the Seattle area, and the WSJ even recently picked up the topic looking at mostly consumer offerings.
But businesses are really the ones that are closely examining FMC choices, as the technology can save them money and make their workers more productive — well, they hope. Here’s three new choices in the enterprise FMC arena from Siemens, DiVitas Networks and Tango Networks:
Full story
Skype released some interesting information from Skype for Business 
about its business VoIP users:
Business users have always been part of the Skype family and make up more than 30 percent of Skype’s global community of users. In a recent survey of 250 businesses using Skype, 95 percent claimed to have saved on their telecommunications costs and 80 percent shared that using Skype had increased employee productivity. The survey also revealed that 62 percent of the companies using Skype communicate better with customers and 76 percent said they work more closely with colleagues because Skype is so easy to use.
Granted, 250 businesses isn’t a huge sample size, but the information on their VoIP results is interesting, as it confirms our expectations.
Skype’s business VoIP service has also added new features:
The new features in Skype for Business make it easier for businesses of all sizes to install and manage Skype. Skype can now be easily installed on multiple computers using the Windows Installer package (commonly known as MSI). This gives system administrators greater control over how to deploy Skype across their corporate networks.
Skype for Business also includes an enhanced online business control panel which enables companies to centrally manage and allocate SkypeIn phone numbers and SkypeOut credits to allow an organization to make cheap Skype calls to landline or mobile phones. Network administrators can enable automatic top-up of SkypeOut credits to individual Skype accounts and centrally manage company invoices.
New enterprise controls allow network administrators to use existing IT management tools to remotely configure Skype clients, turn off various Skype features, such as file transfer, based on company, group or department IT policies. Network administrators interested in better understanding how Skype works and how to manage Skype in an enterprise environment can download a PDF of Skype’s Guide for Network Administrators.
As demonstrated by last year’s (alleged) HP corporate espionage scandal, businesses will go to great lengths to get the edge on their competition. It has even been reported that some foreign governments eavesdrop on business communications (phone calls, e-mails) to give domestic companies an advantage.
Aside from the typical benefits of VoIP, including cost savings and flexibility, business VoIP solutions can also provide extra security for phone calls against eavesdropping. High value targets might be calls between top executives, discussions of confidential sales strategies, mergers and acquisitions, or the development or launch of a new product.
Companies should already be requiring employees to use an encrypted VPN (virtual private network) to gain access to the corporate intranet. For enterprise VoIP or other in-house implementations, this makes VoIP security easy: Internet phone calls that your employees make from the road are already protected at least back to your company’s network. This, of course, assumes that you have a secure VPN service running that uses strong encryption, such as AES.
Smaller companies using a hosted VoIP solution should check with their providers. If the company doesn’t have any offers, an add-on such as Phil Zimmermann’s zFone might be useful.
While some argue that Skype 
is a good option because it makes use of encryption, others argue that the encryption is used to protect Skype secrets (it’s not open source) and allow it to pass through filters more easily. Without a professional, independent evaluation of the security features, while Skype offers a good VoIP product, we cannot assume anything about its security.
And don’t forget that phone calls are just one part of the equation. Physical security, shredding documents before discarding them, etc., are as important as ever.
And there are plenty of stories of airline passengers being lucky enough to sit next to a competitor on the way to a sales presentation - a competitor who works with confidential sales materials in plain sight. Listening to Internet phone calls seems like a lot of hassle when presented with this kind of gift!
Post your VoIP security questions below and we’ll answer them in a future story.
According to a new report from technology research firm In-Stat, hosted VoIP service for small businesses (20 to 50 lines) will continue strong growth, with a market size reaching US$2 billion by 2010. Analyst David Lemelin says that small businesses seeking the benefits of VoIP, but that don’t have the capital or technical expertise are find hosted VoIP to be a good solution.
In-Stat predicts 3 million US hosted VoIP "seats" by 2010, citing cost savings as a major factor in the decision, as well as flexibility for multi-location businesses.
