How did you get started and what made you target hosted VoIP?
In 1998 I came up with this concept of hosted phone system. I would say we are the first to come out with this hosted PBX system. We launched our service offering and at the same time two other players - Gobeam and Telverse - also launched similar offering. Fortunately we grew very fast and raised our second round of money in 2001.
What has been the progress so far in terms of the number of customers?
We serve about 250 enterprise customers.
Are you mostly serving the SMEs or are there any large customers as well for yor hosted offering?
It is mainly the smaller businesses, organization with 100 to 500 employees or at least 100 or more people per site. Although one of our largest clients has around 6000 employees but it is stretched across 600 locations.
Is there any VoIP provider in your area that you compete with or is the competition mainly coming from traditional system integrators and PSTN providers?
We see Cbeyond to an extent. Apart from them it is the regular old local systems integrators that are selling phone systems.
What is your pricing like?
We have packaged local, Internet, long distance and hosted PBX service as well as the equipment, transport for $50-80 per user per month. The only thing that the customer has to buy is the telephone which can be IP or the analog phone.
Whose VoIP solutions do you use?
Broadsoft for hosted PBX platform; Polycom phones …we did quite a bit of testing with Cisco IP phones as well but there are many reasons why we standardized on Polycom. So in terms of end user equipment it is Polycom. We also work with Carrier Access, Cisco and Sonus.
Do you have any of your customers using a mix of hosted PBX and premise based IP PBX or even open source PBX?
It is still early for an enterprise to do that sort of thing. What I believe we are going to see over next few years is that both open source and other solutions you mentioned will exist. Having said that we have already implemented some open source components for services like trunk replacement. Those types of services would be open source based. But the more complex functionalities like the call center capabilities, multi-site networking of locations, advanced messaging etc … that is where you will continue to see Broadsoft like systems.