Source: www.voip-news.com
VoIP & Gadgets Blog reports that 31 million IP phones are expected to ship by 2012 … the Mayan Doomsday. Why exactly did they make that leap?
VoIP News of the UK reports that a railway is upgrading to a VoIP system for rail announcements.
VoIP Watch says that WiFi via mobile is on the rise.
Source: www.voip-news.com
There’s a new product available that combines elements of trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition and salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Fonality’s trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition can be obtained from Fonality Australia.
The collaboration of the two innovative systems provides a unique customer centric view of a company’s telephony interaction and contributes to the customer value creation.
Fonality Australia director, Marc Englaro said that it used to take time and budget to create the kind of deep integration between a CRM and a phone system.
“Fonality is creating a clear channel between the two systems and helping organisations get a complete picture of the interactions with a customer or prospect. Fonality is the first company to provide automatic logging of phone calls into Salesforce.com. No longer do the sales and service representatives have to manually log calls into the CRM system. Now, all inbound and outbound calls are automatically matched with the corresponding record in Salesforce.com, and call data is captured and logged,” said Fonality Australia director Marc Englaro.
According to the companies:
The Fonality UAE value creation process is driven by the following features:
- Performance Management:
- Automatic Call History provides a detailed history of who employees are calling and the duration of each call.
- Integrated Call Recording allows any call to be recorded from the PBX system and attached to the corresponding record in Salesforce.com.
- Lead Management Reporting provides reports on how many calls were required for conversion, lead activity, etc.
- Agent Activity Reporting ranks agents based on activity and productivity.
- Outbound Call Reporting shows which reports are busiest on the phone, how many calls have been made to leads and customers.
Source: andyabramson.blogs.com
Let’s face it. This is nothing new. For years one of Cisco’s channel partners has been SBC, Bell South and other now AT&T owned companies, working on the front lines as integrators as far back as at least 2001. AT&T has also been one of Cisco’s best customers, buying lots of routers. The big honking types that make it possible for all the traffic that is IP to work very smoothly.
So the latest "marketing" hook up, to sell Telepresence to the corporate market, by the two giants working together.
It’s a triple win all around if the customers buy. I predict they will. Here’s why:
1) Bandwidth will go to more places now via AT&T and their carrier partners who will insure enough pipe to make an endpoint work
2) Video conferencing technology is at a point where its no longer the fuzzy picture. It works. Look at the in room like quality of SightSpeed (client), the portable video on the Nokia N810 and yes even Skype has achieved to see just how good laptop video is. Now add in the kind of processors that Cisco’s Telepresence delivers, some fat pipe from AT&T that’s being managed from end to end and you get an experience, not simply a picture.
3) The Green Movement-nothing will propel more adoption of video conferencing than the environmental issues other than one more tied to it factor. Gas and travel. These are lynch pins to driving the acceptance.
Source: andyabramson.blogs.com
According to London based Infonetics Research the sale of data cards are growing around the world. This is great for companies like iPass.
Now all they need is a 3G consumer play to go past the millions of enterprise customers who use their service for global WiFi roaming. GSM would be my preferred play, but my guess is given their USA dominance and the better build out of Verizon Wireless and Sprint EVDO networks that initially an EVDO play would be more appealing.
Why are more people turning to data cards? We’re living in an always on, always connected world.
Source: www.voip-news.com
Concierage Communications has sold more than $250,000 in installed monthly recurring revenue of managed IP telecommunications and Internet services provider TeleSphere through its sales to more than 100 locations in 40 states.
“We are excited to see TeleSphere partners like Concierge reach such an impressive milestone,” said Dean Jordan, director of channel sales for TeleSphere. “The industry is quickly moving toward IP PBX and hosted IP services, and innovative partners like Concierge who promote SIP trunking and hosted IP services are benefiting the industry tremendously.”
Concierge markets TeleSphere solutions including BusinessSphere Connect, BusinessSphere Select, BusinessSphere Complete and BusinessSphere Remote.
“We are pleased with the relationship we have with TeleSphere and their consistent performance over the past five years as a managed VoIP provider,” said Clark Atwood, vice president of technical sales for Concierge Communications. “We have yet to find another VoIP provider that can match the private architecture, platform stability, customer service and feature choices. When you have a provider who delivers VoIP so flawlessly, you will have people referring business to you.”
Source: www.voip-news.com
One of the (many) reasons that small and medium businesses are moving to VoIP and IP telephony is the ability to cheaply and, more importantly, easily embed calling into their other applications. The reason? To make it easier and cheaper to call people, field calls and manage that communication. But let’s be honest – a whole new phone system just to make it a little easier to talk to people? That isn’t the only reason. The hidden reason is sales – helping to make it easier to set up a call center that integrates into a sales tool like CRM. And that is the missing link – the link that connects VoIP to call center to CRM to SALES.
VoIP-News’ sister publication InsideCRM has just launched a fantastic nine-part FREE webinar series looking at this very issue – how a small to medium business can take its whole sales infrastructure up to the level of a Fortune 500 company – at much lower cost.
The first webinar – Tools to Attract and Retain Customers - has already taken place and you can see the free archived version here.
The second – Convince Your Sales Staff To Use CRM – addresses one of the big barriers to success with VoIP and CRM. You can sign up for it here.
The third – CRM Success – looks at how some real businesses succeeded with CRM – you can register for that one here.
There will be more webinars in the series after these three, so check in regularly at InsideCRM.
Source: www.voip-news.com
A recent report, Enterprise Telephony, from Infonetics Research indicates that although spending dropped 1% in the second quarter of this year, research now has worldwide sales figures slightly back on track and up 11% for the third quarter. Must be all that end-of-the-year spending to make accountants happy.
“The Big Three (Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel) had excellent quarters, all growing well into the double digits,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research, in a recent press release. “The bump this quarter was partially due to seasonal factors, as the third quarter tends to be strong, but also because of increased demand across the board, even in the TDM segment. Overall, 2007 is on track for high single-digit growth over 2006.”
Additional highlights from the report include:
Cisco pulls away from the pack in 3Q07, after several quarters of neck and neck competition between the top 5 IP PBX vendors
Worldwide VoIP gateway sales are up 10% in 3Q07 over 2Q07
The overall enterprise telephony market is forecast to grow to $12 billion in 2010
Hybrid PBX systems account for 64% of all PBX/KTS system line shipments worldwide; pure IP lines account for 18%, TDM lines 17%
IP phone shipments are forecast to grow in the double digits each year through 2010
42% of all PBX/KTS and IP PBX system sales come from EMEA, 33% from North America, 18% from Asia Pacific, and 6% from CALA
Source: www.voip-news.com
Recent research from the team at In-Stat is reflecting huge things for IP phone sales over the next few years. While users have been able to use their traditional equipment while enjoying VoIP benefits, the times, they are a-changin’. Spurned on by the growing adoption and popularity of VoIP, more and more business and consumer customers are upgrading their equipment to IP phones to take advantage of better service options and pricing. Additional research found:
In 2011, 93 million IP phones will ship to businesses and consumers, up from 24.3 million in 2007.
Businesses will predominantly deploy desktop IP phones through the forecast period. IP DECT and Wi-Fi VoIP phones will be deployed primarily by specific vertical industries.
The consumer market for handsets will be driven by combo WLAN/cellular phones offered by operators who begin offering FMC services.
