A lifeline for drowning clients

“We’re looking at hunt group and ring group capabilities, so you can do things such as create a workgroup for your sales force and have the system check if other people in the group are available to take the call before going to voicemail. Like our other features, it can all be configured through our web portal. We’re getting to the point where you can just put a VoIP phone on your desktop and manage everything through your MyNetFone account online. You can create groups, set up diversion and even allocate new numbers on the fly from the website.

It’s unifying communications whilst removing the complexity.”

Such services don’t leave much room at the table for the channel. The advances of Voice over IP and UC empower organisations to take control of their telecommunications systems. This means many organisations are looking for a supplier that doesn’t look to put the squeeze on customers in the form of expensive call-out fees to handle trivial tasks.

David Blaymires is a director of JobBag, a Sydney software house developing accounting and resource management software targeted at SMEs. When Blaymires arrived at work one Monday morning to discover his ageing phone system had given up the ghost, he took it as a sign it was time to move into the age of Voice over IP.

Blaymires advises businesses in the market for a VoIP solution to look to system integrators who give their customers control over their own phone system.

“Long gone are the days of paying your voice system integrator to make an expensive house call every time you want to add a telephone or make some small change to the system,” Blaymires said.

“I tell people to look for system integrators supporting open standards, so you’ve got the freedom to consider a best of breed solution. Next, ask how open is the API [Application Programming Interface]. How easily can other systems talk and communicate with their phone systems? Beware of system integrators who want to lock you into something you’re not sure about.”

So far, the whole concept of UC would seem to cut the channel’s lunch. Much of the channel makes its money through integration – basically helping businesses stick components together so they play nicely with each other. In days gone by, rollouts such as Computer Telephony Integration were a messy process that chewed through plenty of billable hours for system integrators, but today vendors are trying to offer such integrated functionality out of the box. At the same time, customers are demanding more control over their own communications systems.

a clients collaboration drowning for lifeline networking