I’ve been answering to sales inquires for many years. Most of the questions are of course related either to Unified Communications or to the hosting world and sometimes they can be very funny. For example, a couple of days ago, someone asked me why we’ve chosen orange as our brand color.
Search Results for: Communications
We wrote much of the material below in 2008 for a whitepaper, but things haven’t changed much. That’s why I want to give some advice to small companies that want to choose a hosted Unified Communications service; hopefully they will make a better choice.
The key is to always ask the service provider before taking any purchase decision. There is no perfect software or perfect solution, but the vendor must be aware of that and he must know how to get closer to perfection. Enjoy the following questions and do not hesitate to ask them before choosing a hosted service. Although they look quite simple, you might be surprised about what kind of answers you will get.
I am writing this in the plane, coming back from WebhostingDay 2010. The event took place in Bruhl, Germany. From our perspective, the event was much better than last year and this happened due to the growing hosting providers’ interest in Unified Communications. Many people heard and understood our message, even with the small resources put on marketing. I will resume below the most important things about WHD 2010.
We are sponsoring WebhostingDay 2010
I’ve just returned from Parallels Summit 2010. I attended the summit with two colleagues, our Business Development manager and our Director of Business Operations in Americas. It was a very good event for us, with lots of discussions and findings. I will share some of the most important things below.
We are going to be present at Parallels Summit 2010 that will take place in Miami, between 22 February and 24 February. The event is free and it’s going to be nice, you can register here
VoipNow 2.0.3 was released, this is the first news. There are many bug fixes and also several interesting new features also. The next version of VoipNow will be 2.0.4, which is a minor release that will include VoipNow Automation. Speaking of Automation it is still not releasable, but we are making progresses with every day passed. The next major version of VoipNow will be VoipNow 2.1.0 and it’s scheduled for end of Q4 2009.
I am constantly monitoring our Help Desk tickets. I am looking for improvement ideas, common mistakes (for example if many people make the same mistake, we must change something in the product) and generally anything that can improve our products and services.
That’s why I was able to discover some surprising things, one of the most important in my perspective being related to our customer’s education related to production systems management. I will discuss about VoipNow, because it’s more complex, but everything below can be considered best practice (in my opinion, of course).
Several days ago we released VoipNow 2 Beta. You can register and download beta here. The received feedback, judged on the number of received bugs is good. We gathered only four bugs till now from beta testers (we got no critical bug). VoipNow 2 changes some of the perceptions about Unified Communications systems.
This is an opened question to hosters, don’t hesitate to provide feedback. Over the last year we noticed something very interesting, namely hosters starting to offer VoIP to businesses. Some of our customers started on their own, while others were convinced by my colleagues (in some cases it was pretty hard). Some companies moved slowly, other positioned their products incorrectly, but most were succesful and they are very happy now.
We fell that this process takes more time than it should. Market is moving. Hosting is commodity. On a long run Google with “get” the customer. They could “get” even businesses (no business will use Google Apps now, but in two years, who knows). Microsoft is now a hoster (dangerously raising the bar for providers). It’s obvious that in these conditions hosters must expand their business. They have the customer and they can offer much more, not only old fashioned hosting. Otherwise they will lose this customer. Unified communications is an important piece in the puzzle and maybe the easiest to offer and support.
We started building resources to help hosters understand the opportunities behind unified communications, but we need your help. We are preparing for our most important release ever (VoipNow 2 – more to follow) and we want to accompany this release with many more resources to help you. Don’t hesitate to add your input.
