iiNet dials cloud for SMB voice on-demand

Broadband provider iiNet has launched an on-demand voice service for SMBs in partnership with Polycom.

The cloud service involves a hosted solution where SMBs access conferencing facilities, advanced call routing and music on hold using iiNet’s infrastructure and support with Polycom’s voice solutions. Head of iiNet business Greg Bader confirmed its business team would remain as support for customers following onsite installation.

The high incidence of small business customers buying consumer products prompted the ISP to offer specialist products. Bader said small businesses were 10 percent of its business and growing.

“We pride ourselves on responding to customer requests in regards to functionality and features with small business products,” Bader said.

“We’re really just responding to customer demand.”

“It’s a huge market in Australia and the basic functionality they need is not a world different from residential. A really simple way to look at it, iiNet grew from a small business ourselves and a lot of the functionality we built ourselves lends itself to that market.”

Bader said iiNet would announce more cloud products over the next year.

“Hosted solutions appeal to a certain part of the market,” he said.

“What we’ve done now with voice telephony, we’re going to bring it out in terms of cloud computing. At the end of the day there’s not boundaries in terms of where we play, we’ll talk to anybody.”