Jasomi Sets Sights On North American Channel Partners

What's more, the company hopes to have the majority of its global sales move through solution providers, said the company's top executive. "We've now reached the stage where we can demonstrate enough pull in North America to attract resellers, VARs and systems integrators here," said Dan Freedman, CEO of Jasomi, San Jose, Calif., during an interview with CRN at the Spring VON 2004 IP communications conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The company has shipped more than 1 million seats of its PeerPoint session border controller technology, which enables VoIP traffic to navigate successfully through firewalls. Firewalls typically are not capable of translating IP addresses and port numbers within voice packets as they can do for Web and e-mail traffic. As a result, IP calls that pass through firewalls are not completed, Freedman said. "Anytime you're deploying VoIP in a complex network, there's going to be a need for a session border controller," Freedman said.

Currently, about 25 percent of Jasomi's global sales go through its channel, comprised primarily of overseas partners in Europe and Japan. With the addition of a North American partner base, Freedman expects channel sales to account for 50 percent to 60 percent of overall sales.

"At the enterprise level, which accounts for about half of our business, I think it all could go through the channel," Freedman said. The other half of privately held Jasomi's revenue comes from service provider customers.

Jasomi is spending about $1.5 million this year to develop its North American channel, hoping to lure solution providers with discounts as high as 55 percent off list prices.

The tiered program, scheduled to launch in June at the Supercomm conference, will offer volume-based discounts, co-marketing and training, he said. By June, the company hopes to sign up two or three North American partners and wants to have 10 to 15 active, successful partners on board by year's end, he said.

To help stave off channel conflict, Jasomi provides double compensation to its six-member direct-sales force so that both partners and sales reps are compensated on deals closed within their geography, Freedman said, noting that the company will try to place every incoming lead with a channel partner.

Also at the VON conference, Jasomi announced a software-only version of its session border controller, dubbed PeerPoint Embedded Edition, which gives systems integrators and OEMs the ability to integrate the technology into other infrastructure elements of the VoIP puzzle, such as softswitches, firewalls or servers running call control functionality "It lets systems integrators present an integrated solution on a single box," Freedman said.

Available now on Windows and Linux, PeerPoint Embedded Edition starts at $6,000 for 100 seats. That compares with entry-level pricing of $12,500 for Jasomi's combo hardware/software solution.