TelephonyBuyersGuide

Some punctuation to the VOIP industry... Asterisk

In all of this commentary about virtual PBX services and Voice Over IP, has anyone really been concerned about what may be one of the stealth winners... Asterisk?

A cousin of mine has a business in the high uptime server for rent industry and has used this environment to hook up several small businesses to a full VOIP enabled VPBX system... using Asterisk. If you're not familiar with this open source solution, and you do have some technical folks who can do the install and configuration, this is a completely do-able solution. Alternately, a few folks such as SRIHosting.com are providing this as a service product.

Food for thought!

Mark

posted by TelephonyBuyersGuide @ 11:52 AM 0 comments

I can't help it... Vonage is like the school yard kid with "kick me" written on their back:-)

Early on, we called it... no sustainable business plan = no long term value proposition = no long term value. Yet, I have to say that I really didn't see this one... everyone's wanting to sue them. I mean, the news is just littered with new charges and accusations.

OK, I understand how a stock sold at $17 and now valued at $7 is a real bummer but if you're stupid enough to buy this stock your smart enough to loose your money. These guys spent some $300-500 per sub to acquire customers! Not counting churn, which is a BIG event, it would take them nearly a year and a half to make back the money they spent today to acquire a new customer. This is not a business plan. Just like the Internet of 1999, brand loyalty doesn't mean a thing if you're not providing highly competitive value to your customers - offering, quality, price... the whole shooting match. Spending wildly, irrationally today does not mean that you'll have the lock on the industry 5 years from now.

There's just so much to say about this business, glad I'm passionate about it:-)

posted by TelephonyBuyersGuide @ 11:39 AM 0 comments

uReach finally does what all unified communications companies should do...

How much more sense does it make that a unified communications company should offer an integrated VOIP product? Gee, a person can now call outbound... brilliant!

That being said, they are the first major player to do so. Sure, others pretend to offer dialtone by doing some type of creditcardesque call, and others attend the VOIP tradeshows, but none of the other guys are doing it.

KUDO's to uReach!

You can read their press release with the announcement here.

Gotta tell you, the most difficult thing to understand is that their website doesn't even feature the new functionality. Shame.

Go figger:-(

posted by TelephonyBuyersGuide @ 10:58 AM 0 comments