Interview with Jose David, CEO Citel
Your offering very much emphasizes connecting IP PBX to digital proprietary phones. What is the logic here? Utilize the existing phone wiring?
Exactly. The existing phone wiring as well as the existing phones as well. We make an adaptor that connects over 24 proprietary digital phones manufactured previously by the likes of Nortel and Avaya. So with our offering you take benefits of VoIP without getting rid of your digital phones and wiring.
Is the adaptor like a multi port ATA ?
It goes a step beyond that. It supports not just analog phones but also digital phones that the PBX manufacturers have made historically. You cannot take a Nortel business phone and plug it into an RJ11. Your proprietary phone at your desktop at work speaks a totally different language. It only knows how to talk to the PBX made by the same manufacturer. Our intellectual property is about how each of those proprietary digital handsets signal when you press ‘Conference’ or ‘Hold’. In our case it sends that signal to our box and our box then relays that signal onward to an IP PBX or a hosted PBX making the features transparently available to proprietary phones.
When we bought our PBX, we bought for about $1000 and the desktop phones cost really peanuts, something around $20 kind of range. I thought that it was counter intuitive to be concerned about handset costs rather than the PBX? But since you tell me that you preserve investment in digital phones, the approach makes sense.
Those phones used to cost upwards of 500 to 1000 dollars. They are really sophisticated phones with 20 buttons on them. And the old ones have better audio technology. They have better quality proprietary chips rather than cheap chips in the present day IP Phones.
Does the user really get the true benefits of VoIP with these proprietary digital handsets?
Yes. What are the benefits of VoIP? There are some added features, reduced toll charges, fixed rate bill. That all comes with our product. You get all the IP PBX features ported over to digital phones and you also keep the proprietary PBX features. You can do things like getting voicemail on your Outlook screen rather than on phone. So you can have all that. And the installation is as easy as connecting ATA to your analog phone.
What about services like FMC, or mobile pbx, or other web mashups?
We have simultaneous ringing feature that we can enable. There are dual mode wifi-gsm services out there in the market but it is going to be a while till that makes its way into the enterprise market. What I am more scared of is a wireless provider getting rid of the PBX and providing wireless hosted PBX services. I don’t know why they are not doing that already but it is in the pipeline maybe 5 to 10 years from now. About the web mashups, I guess you are talking about the PC interfaces and all that. With our solution I can make calls using my PC or Nortel digital handset. If I go home I can make calls from PC using the same account. But I don’t think we are quite ready yet to shift from desktop phones to using PC for voice communication.
Do you serve SMBs more or the large enterprises?
Both. Our competition is IP phones. When you deploy $250 IP phones, you have to upgrade your wiring from RJ11 to Ethernet. You have to upgrade your Cisco network to handle Power-over-Ethernet. And then you have to add software that manages QoS and prioritize voice.
Are you selling direct to the enterprises or are you going via the service providers?
We are doing both.
Are you not effectively competing with you customers then?
There is a little bit of conflict. But it is still early days for us. We are trying to get our word out at this stage.
We have seen players like Vonage making a significant impact on residential market. Why is there no such case on the enterprise VoIP area or in the hosted PBX area?
It will happen if someone is willing to make an investment. We saw this is the voicemail arena. If you recall there were central office voicemail providers offering it to homes. And that got awareness of benefits related to voicemail. Then we saw Octel penetrate the Fortune 500. Then we saw Centigram penetrate the SMB. Then we saw the likes of Applied Voice and Active Voice penetrate the lower tier companies. I think the same will happen. Vonage has done a good job penetrating the residential space. We will see something similar in enterprise space. And it could be a tier 1 carrier or a lower tier carrier.
