Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

BT Retail has conceded that hosted telephony is a viable alternative to on-premise telephone systems by launching BT Cloud Voice through their direct channels and their local business franchises. Another Broadsoft-based offering, this is good news for their competitors because BT will boost demand through generic advertising and by the fact that they have ‘legitimised’ the product. However they will also be a significant competitor so here a five things you might need to know when you inevitably meet them in the market.

Are you looking for the best deal on Broadsoft hosted voice solutions?

Do you have a demand for hosted voice? Are you looking for a reliable Broadsoft partner?

Jola is a channel-focussed business communications supplier and our hosted voice offering is called JolaPhone.

Proposition to resellers

Premium Broadsoft seat, UK calls and a Polycom handset from £9.70 per month (price to you)

How to generate leads for hosted voice and internet connectivity

Getting started

You have signed up with a supplier such as Jola for hosted voice solutions. What next?

Step 1

Add the new products and services to your website. List them under products, provide an overview of the services and if appropriate add a download to further information. Think about key words and phrases in your web content. Contact your supplier for help with text and graphics. Ensure you have a data capture box so that interested parties can submit their details for further information. Forward these leads to your sales team for immediate follow up.

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:

1. Acceptance of the concept

Before IP voice was commercially viable, millions of US SMEs were already using Centrex. In the early 1980s the US telecommunications market liberalised, creating 7 local operating companies (the equivalent of Openreach) nicknamed ‘Baby bells’. These all launched their own central exchange offerings (Centrex) in preference to on-premise telephone equipment. With a big stake in the equipment market, BT was never really interested in Centrex and the UK’s first Centrex product launched by Mercury in the early 1990s was clumsy, unreliable and expensive.

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.

According to the Recruitment Industry Trends survey the recruitment industry generated £28.7 billion turnover last year a rise of 8.2% on the previous year. 91% comes from temporary contracts, which I thought was a sign of the times. The industry is growing and looking to hosted voice to support this growth, but why?

Security service companies such as home alarm fitters are turning to the cloud to host their phone systems, but why?