Technology Reseller - v28

01732 759725 IP TELEPHONY 38 available to business users was proprietary to the vendor (e.g. Ericsson, Phillips, STC and others) and as a result none of these systems could be linked together. From liberalisation of the market in the mid-1980s until the early 2000s, data resellers sold IT products and services and telecom resellers sold voice telephony. The two rarely overlapped. All of this changed with the introduction of IP-based systems and cloud or hosted telephony solutions in around 2005. Demand for these solutions was driven and enabled by a number of factors, notably the availability of cheaper and robust internet connectivity, the growing ubiquity of IP-based networking and the It could be argued that in the hundred years following the invention of the telephone in the nineteenth century not much changed. From a business use perspective, a key move was the transition from using multiple single lines to aggregators that could connect many lines – we called these systems PBX (Private Branch Exchanges). Then, in the 1960s, STD (subscriber trunk dialling) was introduced, which allowed users to dial external numbers directly from their desktop phones. This applied to home users as well. For most of this period, these solutions could only be provided by the Post Office, General Post Office (GPO, which ceased in 1969), Post Office Telecommunications, British Telecommunications and now BT. In the mid 1980s this monopoly was broken and third party vendors were progressively allowed to provide more telephony services. At the same time, BT was privatised. Not much else changed: the equipment financial crash of 2008. At this point, many IT resellers declared it to be open season on telephony sales and there were many reasons, both financial and functional, for them to do so. PBX Downsides: 1 Proprietary PBX software made interconnectivity almost impossible at anything other than an eye-watering cost. 2 High up-front capital expenditure costs and ongoing maintenance charges. 3 PBX are only scalable one-way. You can increase capacity but not reduce it. Once enlarged, you end up paying costs for the enlarged configuration. 4 Software upgrades are regular and chargeable – again this can be very costly and involve system downtime. 5 Difficult to respond to disaster recovery situations. Hosted Telephony Upsides: 1 The ‘Provided as a Service’ model mitigates against initial costs. This proved very popular in the wake of the 2008 crash when CAPEX budgets were slashed. 2 Feature software and functionality is ‘Evergreen’ – always up to date and downloaded automatically from the internet. 3 Disaster recovery is simple. With a hosted telephony solution, the company For IT-centric resellers, the voice telephony market always used to be something of a black art, but with the advent of IP-based telephony solutions in the form of IP PBXs and hosted telephony platforms these solutions talk their language, so how can they monetise this market? Selling hosted and cloud-based telephony solutions I N S I G H T IT resellers looking to sell hosted telephony solutions have a huge range of suppliers in the UK to choose from, so what advice can we give for selecting a supplier? Users today need much more than PBX dial tone replacement, so a full list of built-in PBX functionality is a must. Thereafter, applications such as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), call management and reporting, call analytics and contact centre working need to be top of a wish list, either built-in or from an ecosystem of suppliers that are supported and recognised by the hosted telephony vendor. Finally, hosted telephony is software-based, so the user and resellers interfaces should also be software-based. Most suppliers will have a portal of some sort, where configurations can be altered and additions made. It is helpful if these also incorporate user billing. Such a capability has become increasingly important in recent years due to the granularity with which applications can be provided. If the user wants a feature turned on for six employees for a month, the billing needs to be integrated within the portal so that revenues are accurately reflected on the reseller top line.