Technology Reseller - v16

01732 759725 18 TELEPHONY its simplicity, end users can be authorised to make routine, day-to-day changes themselves, saving resellers from having to spend time on things like setting up call diverts or auto attendant settings. Nor, points out Spitfire Engineering Solutions Director Dominic Norton, do resellers (or their customers) need to spend time and money on training courses. “With some traditional solutions you pay to go on a special course, but we have made this as easy to self-manage as possible,” he said. Simple pricing The simplicity of the Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 proposition extends to its clear, transparent pricing of £6 per extension, per month, with free set-up for contracts of 12 months or more. This makes Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 one of the best value hosted telephony solutions on the market. Even when you add in the cost of renting handsets for customers that don’t want to buy them outright, the cost is just £9 to £11 per extension (depending on phone model). The fact that Spitfire charges by extension rather than by device, as some suppliers do, is another selling point, as it allows users to associate more than one phone with their extension without charge. This could be an office phone, a DECT phone (as a second office phone), a home office phone, a softphone on a notebook computer, an app on a smartphone, or all of the above. Suppliers that charge by device require customers to buy a subscription for each additional device used, adding significantly to the total cost of any deployment. An experienced vendor In addition to a compelling sales proposition and easy management, Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 gives resellers the reassurance of partnering with a supplier that has more than 30 years’ experience in business telephony and IP engineering and its own resilient network infrastructure. This, explains Norton, ensures that Spitfire provides the reliability that resellers and their customers demand. “We have inherent reliability on the virtual server infrastructure we have built and, as a SIP provider, we have built reliability and resilience into our SIP network nodes as well. We have different back-up gateways in different geographic areas, so if something did fail in one of our network nodes it would auto failover to another – for inbound and outbound calls, which many vendors can’t do. That’s provided as standard in the phone system without any additional cost,” he said. The solution of choice For the time being, Spitfire will continue to sell its existing SIP Communicator™ and 3CX solutions alongside Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1, but Norton is confident that the latter’s simplicity, competitive pricing and flexibility will make it the hosted solution of choice for most resellers. “With Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1, there has never been a better time for resellers to move their customers’ voice to the cloud, whether they come from an IT or a voice background. Because of the way it has been developed, partners can do as little or as much as they want. They can pass on an opportunity for us to fulfil, and receive a commission for doing so, or they can add value by providing a managed service themselves,” he said. To find out more about selling Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1, please call 0207 501 3150 or visit www.spitfire.co.uk. Spitfire has added a new hosted telephony solution to its product portfolio, giving resellers an exciting new IP telephony option for small and medium-sized businesses. Developed in-house by the company’s engineers and software development teams using open source code, Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 is as easy to implement and manage for resellers as it is for end user customers. The system is hosted on servers in one of Spitfire’s secure core network nodes and connects to a router on the customer’s premises using voice-approved broadband or converged voice and data Ethernet circuits. The customer just plugs in pre-programmed handsets and they are ready to go. This makes it an ideal solution for channel partners that require a low-touch solution, including IT resellers that are new to voice and don’t want to spend time managing customers’ systems. Auto-provisioning handsets that don’t require manual programming and can be updated remotely at the press of a button, as well as the option of a fully managed service from Spitfire, keep reseller involvement to a minimum. Of course, some resellers will want to provide a managed service, and for them, the intuitive web-based administrator console is another attraction of Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1. Its logical layout and drop-down menus make it easy for a reseller to control all aspects of a customer’s system remotely. Because of As easy as you like Spitfire’s new hosted telephony solution gives IT resellers an easy entry into telephony services Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 gives resellers the reassurance of partnering with a supplier that has more than 30 years’ experience in business telephony and IP engineering Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 Key Benefits n a full set of features out of the box n free calls between extensions n softphones and smartphone apps for full integration of mobile devices n an online portal for easy system management (for those who prefer to do this themselves) n clear, transparent pricing System Features n Web-based management console n Call management/routing (e.g. call transfer, forward, hold, park/pickup) n Auto attendant/Digital receptionist n Call queuing & management statistics n Music on hold n Voicemail including email notifications n Call twinning (ringing deskphone and mobile simultaneously) n Softphone integration n Programmable buttons on handset/ softphone n Group contact directory n Multi-user conference call bridge EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD SPITFIRE HOSTED PBX 2.1