Business Phone Providers Ignore VoIP at Their Peril

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

The music industry is a famous example of a business community that failed to adopt new technology because it wanted to protect existing sources of revenue that the new technology challenged. The same, to a large degree, also happened with the newspaper business.

IntelaCloud doesn’t want it to happen to small and medium-sized firms selling business phone solutions, however.

“We have partners who would sell traditional telecom—the NEC dealer, the Panasonic (News - Alert) dealers, the Samsung dealer—and they’ve been losing a lot of their marketshare for people going over to the VoIP side,” explained Paul Daigle, VoIP evangelist for IntelaCloud, during ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami this past January.

“So you’ve got the guys who are still trying to fight that, but the people who are successful are offering not only their traditional side,” he added, “but also offering the VoIP side. They can tell the customer the pros and cons of each, and let the customer make the correct type of decision.”

IntelaCloud helps those businesses continue to sell traditional phone services but also add VoIP to their offerings.

The company does this by offering a cloud VoIP solution that partners can offer their customers. This gives them another tool in their toolbox, meaning they don’t have to suffer the same fate as the music and newspaper industries.

“We enable our partners to go out and either maintain their customer base, or even increase the customer base, with offering VoIP,” said Paul Daigle. “We’re bringing in the bells and whistles, and we’re supporting our partners and also supporting their end users.”

Part of helping its partners is also helping them explain to customers the importance of good Internet connectivity, he said.

“Must-haves for VoIP is good Internet quality,” he noted. “If you don’t have good Internet quality, you don’t have VoIP. A lot of businesses don’t realize that you can operate your data off not-so-good Internet quality, but not having good Internet quality you’re going to be chopping up your voice and not be able to close a deal on the phone. It does not work.”

VoIP is here to stay, and businesses that sell business phone services can either embrace the future or find their revenues dwindling. Daigle and IntelaCloud would like to see the former, not the latter from its partners.

Edited by Cassandra Tucker