Companies with numerous small, distributed offices have found it challenging to find a hosted VoIP solution that focuses on their needs.

Skype and Vonage are options, for example, but they are not business-grade services. The larger U.S. carriers, including AT&T, Qwest, Sprint, and Verizon offer hosted services but they have not focused entirely on businesses with small distributed offices.

Given the state of the market, I was intrigued by IntelliVerse, a company that has built its business around serving businesses with small, distributed offices with fewer than 20 people in each office (go beyond 20, and it may be more cost-effective to deploy VoIP internally). Think real-estate companies, law firms, retailers, consultants, or any organization with a remote salesforce working in small branch or home offices.

What I like about the service is its simplicity, affordability, and feature set. It’s completely hosted and turnkey. You place an order, and the phones come to the office configured and ready to use within about one week.

The company has a few pricing plans, but it generally tries to be 20% less than the competition (read: TDM voice services, as opposed to other VoIP services). So, for about $50 a month (no taxes added onto that), customers get unlimited local and long-distance service, plus features such as unified messaging, fax-to-e-mail, interactive voice response (IVR), automated attendant, abbreviated dialing, call transfer, and network-based find-me, follow-me.

IntelliVerse also recognizes that “small business” doesn’t translate into “unsophisticated business.” So it provides management/monitoring portals for IT administrators - or even presidents of small businesses - to oversee the service performance.

Of course, as with any service, there are some concerns. SLAs aren’t fully baked. Value-added resellers who offer the IntelliVerse service have offered their own SLAs, but you’ll hear the usual “We can’t control the last mile” tune when they’re defending why the SLAs can’t be as solid as you’d like them. IntelliVerse plans to offer a full-fledged offering for SLAs in early 2008.

As I talk to IT executives in recent months, though, I’ve found the performance of VoIP over DSL and cable modems has been decent and predictable in most locations. Once QOS settings are properly tuned, the service works quite well. In rare cases where it’s not good, a company may have to install a separate broadband access line just for VoIP. This helps performance but doesn’t help with the ROI of hard-dollar costs. Where the benefits still reside is in the additional features available with the system.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.