* Avaya to offer hosted IP telephony service for midsize businesses
For the past two years, I’ve listened to countless IT executives discuss how they’d prefer to buy VoIP as a managed or hosted service – particularly for their branch offices.
Time after time, they explained how they couldn’t get what they needed from carriers. They either didn’t offer service in the necessary cities, or they didn’t have an offering at all, or the offering they had just wasn’t quite right.
Apparently, Avaya has been listening to the same repertoire. Last week, the IP telephony vendor announced plans to offer midsize organizations its own hosted IP telephony service, called Avaya On Demand.
Bottom line: Avaya customers now have perhaps the largest number of choices when it comes to buying VoIP technology. They can:
* Buy the equipment for an in-house rollout.
* Use a carrier that offers a hosted service using Avaya gear.
* Go to an Avaya partner and buy resold Avaya-hosted services.
* Buy hosted services directly from Avaya, which runs its own data center.
Yep, you read that right. Avaya is running its own hosted data centers, from which it will sell its own hosted VoIP or let partners resell that same hosted VoIP service.
Other vendors offer the first two or three of the options listed above. In fact, Nortel last week announced that Cypress Communications is offering managed VoIP services in 29 cities, based on Nortel’s platform. And meanwhile, carriers such as Masergy, Sprint, and Verizon offer or plan to offer hosted services based on gear from Alcatel, Cisco, and Lucent.
But so far, Avaya is the only IP telephony manufacturer to offer its own hosted service. Some argue it’s a mistake because of the channel conflict it could create. After all, Avaya is selling hosted services, and so are its partners and the carriers. So, anyway you slice it, they’re all competing for any customer that wants hosted services. (Avaya plans to sell its direct service only to strategic and named accounts.)
In talking to IT executives, though, channel conflict is the least of their worries. They’re just glad to see vendors stepping up to some compelling options that not only are cost-effective, but also technically advanced with key features such as messaging and conferencing.
Both Avaya and Nortel’s announcements are instrumental at helping organizations extend VoIP to their branch offices. With fixed, per-user pricing, IT executives can easily set budgets for their projects and IP-enable their remote staff without placing a huge strain on the rest of their staff.
