I've spent a fair amount of time in the past year ragging on hosted IP PBX companies as being in the forefront of re-inventing Centrex, but I'm beginning to come around. I had a chat this week with Dan Hoffman, CEO of the New York City-based 2005 Fierce 15 winner M5 Networks [1], who's had a fair amount of success teaming with Cisco VARs. Whaleback Systems has also had some success, with a somewhat different strategy--I also hear it has a new service revision coming sometime soon. What bothers me most about these hosted systems is that they still rely on small and medium businesses to have enough control of their networks to allow for enough local throughput, but expects them to not want to worry about what happens on the far side of the firewall. That strikes me as a small market needle to thread, but results may well prove me wrong.
For more information about hosted IP PBXes in the SMB market:
- read this article [2] from Computer Weekly
Links:
[1] http://www.fiercevoip.com/resources/fierce_15/2005
[2] http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/11/27/220214/voip-too-big-a-pain-for-smbs.htm