VoIp Converges on SMB

McLaren said it was important to remember that the smaller the business, the more inclined it would be towards a solution that is brought into the office and professionally installed due to a lack of IT skills.

"Solutions for SMBs need to be installed professionally and not left up to the IT guy - if there even is an IT guy - or someone's nephew to keep it working," he said.

With SMBs looking for professionally installed services, Milton-White said convergence was bringing together partnerships between businesses that had not formerly had a lot to do with each other, particularly from a vendor point of view.

"As vendors we're no longer limited to the traditional voice business partner and we can diversify our channel to include traditional data resellers," he said. "So we have traditional voice resellers learning about data and data resellers learning about voice. The opportunities are really quite diverse."

Milton-White said Avaya now found itself in a position where it had two types of resellers: historical voice business partners - which it was training on data networks - and voice-centric resellers which it was now training in data. With this kind of training being offered by vendors to their resellers, SMBs are finding resellers can serve as a single point of contact for most services. This is appreciated by businesses and, in turn, allows resellers to diversify their offerings. "For any business, it's a much better scenario when the same reseller can provide services that encompass voice and data because otherwise you're dealing with party A and party B, and there can be a degree of fault-passing between the two," Milton-White said.

Working with the idea that the converged network is more than cut-price VoIP calls, Mitel national channel manager, Anne Wrencher, said reseller opportunities already extended beyond simply getting voice onto the data network.

"Customers can already see that convergence is more than just cheap calls," she said. "It's about applications."

Mitel offers applications such as Your Assistant - a desktop productivity tool that integrates with software such as Outlook and allows calls to be transferred on the network via drag and drop - as examples of converged applications that enhance communication.

Milton-White said convergence enabled businesses to know customers better through complementary software applications.

"Convergence is all about enabling and enhancing the customer experience, such as being able to contact someone and also knowing who they are as a customer," he said. "It's that kind of personal information experience that CRM-like packages can give small business to deliver a friendlier approach to customers."

COPY CAT

Regional manager at Linksys, Graeme Reardon, said the desire to go beyond VoIP and into applications was also born from SMBs looking at what larger companies were doing.

"Ultimately, a lot of small businesses are looking at what enterprises have and want some of that," he said. "In the past you would have to pay through the nose for a decent CRM system but now with hosted service providers and the like, the user can tick a box and see it will cost 'x' dollars per month because they have 'y' people on network. It just becomes a capex expense. Simple."

Mitel's Wrencher agreed offering enterprise applications was very appealing to SMBs, but a focus had to remain on the overall pricing.

"For the SMB market, you have to offer an enterprise feel yet be price conscious," she said. "We have created specific SMB bundles that aren't price prohibitive but still offer enterprise functionality."

Reardon said the more applications a reseller could tie into a customer, the less churn they were likely to experience with the business. "Once a reseller is providing all these additional services, it's less likely that the business will move away from that VAR and start shopping around," he said. "They become stickier once they start providing lots of applications."

With the knowledge that SMBs are hungry for convergence and that real opportunities exist, what does a reseller need to do next?

"The real issues are understanding the initial setup and having the skill to spot what the customer really needs," McLaren said. "What sort of firewall do they have? Do they still want to retain their old handsets or move to IP handsets? There are so many things to consider, even with just a VoIP implementation."

Famularo said understanding customer needs was key.

"Resellers these days have to move away from selling just bits of hardware and software. They need to understand customer requirements," he said. "They really need to understand what the customer is on about by simple solicitation on what the customer needs. They can't just put in a 24-port switch and hope for the best."

A solid knowledge of what was possible through convergence was another useful attribute, Milton-White said.

"What are the origins of the reseller? They not only need to understand what convergence is, but how it all works together," he said. "In putting voice on a data network, they need to ensure it's robust enough and that the network is stable enough to support voice in the first place. This often goes back to understanding the ISDNs and PSTNs of this world."

TRAINING UP

One way vendors could make the implementation easier for their resellers was to ensure adequate training was made available to make moving a customer over to a new product as easy a transition as possible, Wrencher said.

"We try to be a distributor of installation services - not just providing our resellers with some equipment," she said. "We have different levels of accreditation. An authorised reseller, for example, doesn't have to be technically trained and can back off support to the distributor. Silver, gold and platinum partners, meanwhile, have increasing degrees of technical skills."

Mitel currently boasts 20 gold, 20 silver and around five platinum partners.

Training was also key in implementation, McLaren said.

"Probably the most important thing the channel needs to understand is that they need to be equipping themselves from a training skills perspective because you can't walk in off the street and do this," he said. "We offer a training induction program in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney each month where resellers can come along for a few days to learn, or just have a refresher course because it's those skills that are so important for them to be successful and grasp the convergence opportunities out there."