SMBs Make for Ideal VoIP Market Opportunities
The SMB market could be the market to be in for VoIP going forward. According to Henry Kaestner, CEO at Bandwidth.com and moderator of VoIP Systems for SMBs: Challenges & Opportunities, a COMPTEL PLUS session today, This is probably the best market for VoIP. People should have been interested in this market four or five years ago. These are customers with the ability to move quickly and are cost-conscious.
The session will focus on the value of VoIP in the traditionally underserved SMB market. It will cover products, the markets, the channel marketing and the challenges involved in tapping this segment.
The session presenters, which include Clark Easterling, vice president of marketing at Perimeter Internetworking, Susanne Peters, international sales director at Comfone, and Paul Raveill, vice president of wholesale services at Intelliverse, will discuss their various approaches to the SMB VoIP opportunity. Kaestner says one-half to one-third of the session time will be devoted to audience questions.
Well talk about servicing this market with automated LNP, online customer service and so on, which is new for SMBs, Kaestner said. They have been overlooked from a systems standpoint up until now.
Other topics will include reaching the SMBs with VARs and agents, product developments and strategies tailored for SMBs, such as bundling VoIP with managed services, and provider challenges, including fax support, nomadic 911, international expansion and SIP registration.
The VoIP market will be evolving in the next two years, and well also look at what SMB telecom in general will be going forward, Kaestner said. The real theme is about execution taking the work engineers have done, getting out there and selling this. What kind of features do people want? How do we do customer service? How do you scale? Should you do a hosted offer or SIP trunking? Theres a lot to touch on.