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.

Better positioned where? 🙂 I agree that the title might be a little funny. But let me explain.

We estimate that around 75% of the providers that offer VoipNow are Internet Telephony only providers, around 15% are hosting providers that also offer Internet Telephony, and the rest of 10% are enterprises.

During the discussions with our customers, we discovered that most VoIP only providers do not usually offer value added services to their users and they only use VoipNow for a determined purpose, which is very specific (let’s say calling cards). We believe that this is unfortunate and that sooner or later the market will force them to go into value added services.

On the other hand, hosting providers usually offer more feature rich services. It’s absolutely clear that the market will converge in the next five years. The unified messaging market will force providers to offer hosting and communications bundled in one package.

For hosting providers it’s reasonably easy to start offering VoIP services, but for telephony service providers it’s not so easy. Even if hosting providers are much slower on adopting things, (surprisingly) they have a very interesting opportunity at their fingers. We can help them address it.