Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

1. Do you want a hosted or traditional business telephone system?

Technology savvy customers will already be considering the benefits of hosted telephony over a traditional phone system. To make your decision consider the following:

Reliability - you need to be able to make and receive calls during business hours with no issues. Research the underlying technology, the uptime guarantees and disaster recovery options. Some hosted solutions allow you to use mobile devices as desktop phones and make and forward calls remotely to ensure business continuity.

According to Market Monitor the market for cloud computing services such as cloud voice will grow at a rate of 36% every year and revenues will be just shy of £12.7bn by 2016. A large percentage of this growth is coming from SMEs being driven by a number of different factors:

Are your customers being held back by poor performance or poor reliability of their broadband?

Low bandwidth, high latency and packet loss can cause many applications such as voice over IP (VOIP) and video conferencing to be unusable. Customers that have checked only with BT often feel that there is nothing to be done.

Few people realise that BT Openreach don’t supply a broadband or leased line service directly to end users. Their customers are service providers that use them for the ‘last mile’ of connectivity services they sell.  

1. Reliable connectivity is cheaper

The biggest barrier to cloud-based telephone systems has been broadband because voice traffic is intolerant to varying speeds and congestion. This issue, coupled with the ‘best-effort’ nature of broadband technologies, has given hosted voice a bad start and a bad name. Now that companies can buy fibre broadband and a dedicated 20Mb leased line for £199 per month they are starting to use it.

1 - Your customers want faster broadband - why not get it from you?

The first company to deliver internet connectivity into a business will often retain that customer as they upgrade their connectivity and move into hosted applications. If you are a business supporting SMEs, internet connectivity is a great first product and a good platform to upsell additional services from.

As the amount of voice traffic carried over the Internet increases, we are seeing both pros and cons to moving to a converged data network in the SME market, but will this affect SME suppliers such as IT support services and business telecommunications providers?

SME growth

According to the latest Small Business Research Report 2015 from Exemplas 40% of SMEs reported an increase in sales turnover on the previous year of trading and 73% plan to grow their business in the next two to three years. As suppliers to this market how can we support their growth?

Increased competition

As more companies enter the market IT support for the SME market is becoming increasingly competitive. It is hard to win new business so there is a focus on providing excellent service to existing customers. One way to win new business especially with local start-ups is internet connectivity. The first company to sell connectivity into a business will retain that customer as they upgrade their connectivity and move into hosted applications. If you are a business selling to SMEs, connectivity is a great first product and a good platform to upsell additional support services from.

To become a one-stop-shop

The mobile market is saturated and mobile companies are taking on specialists to sell IT Support, connectivity and cloud products into their bases. For the SME a converged solution finally makes the one-stop-shop proposition attractive and suppliers that don’t have a complete solution risk exposing core business to new competitors.

Demand for SIM-only deals is increasing in the SME market

Following consumer behaviour, the business market in the UK is finally breaking the link between airtime and handsets. Leasing is now available for handsets and SMEs are moving to SIM only contracts - either using existing handsets or leasing new ones separately. With no base of legacy term contracts to protect this is an ideal time to get into the mobile market.

Textile manufacturers in rural areas are upgrading their internet connections to leased lines for faster speeds and increased security. Those with ERP software found leased circuits met their requirements.

Reason 1 - Faster speeds

Copper broadband is limited to 24Mb/s, fibre broadband offers up to 80Mb/s and Ethernet circuits offer up to 100Gb/s. The more manufacturers use their internet connection the more important speed becomes. 

Reason 2 - Cost reduction

The cost of leased lines has reduced in recent years due to increased competition in the market and the introduction of lower cost technologies such as fibre Ethernet. In addition many SMEs have taken advantage of the government's BDUK voucher scheme which is funding internet upgrades in many UK cities.