VoIP Plays to the Midmarket
Voice over IP is sending ancient PBX phone systems to the land of the dinosaurs, and not just at the enterprise level. VoIP is one of the more popular technologies in today's market because of IP telephony's growth with midmarket clients.
Joel Kappes, co-founder of Milestone Networks in Englewood, Colo., knows just how rapidly VoIP is gaining traction with midsize businesses. Kappes and co-founder Kevin Wiley started Milestone in 2002 as a networking solution provider, intending to generate much of the business around routers and switches. Instead, Milestone discovered high demand for VoIP solutions that integrated customers' voice and data and replaced old legacy phone systems. Kappes and Wiley moved quickly to establish a strong practice around the technology. Today, the bulk of the solution provider's sales comes from one source: ShoreTel IP PBX systems. "IP telephony is our core business with about 75 percent of total sales," Kappes says, "and ShoreTel is our top vendor."
While tier-one vendors, such as Avaya, Cisco and 3Com, have rapidly gained market share with their VoIP offerings, Kappes says ShoreTel has a superior midmarket product, citing better functionality and ease of use. The privately held vendor, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has earned a solid following despite being smaller than the aforementioned networking giants; late last year, Nemertes Research's VoIP customer survey put ShoreTel at the No. 1 spot for the second consecutive year. "We've worked with other IP-telephony products and have had some problems," Kappes says. "We don't ever have to go back and work on ShoreTel's stuff."
The distributed architecture of ShoreTel's IP PBX platform allows the VoIP systems to be integrated easily with Ethernet switches. Milestone's ideal midmarket VoIP solution begins with ShoreTel's ShorePhones, which offer a full suite of calling capabilities and integration with users' desktops and network connections.
For the network foundation, Milestone recommends another unsung networking vendor. "We go with Extreme Networks," Kappes says. "Extreme is our infrastructure partner of choice, and they also have a strong IP-telephony push." Milestone prefers the Aspen 8800 series of Extreme Layer 2-4 modular switches that offers a unified access layer for IP-telephony deployments and an interconnect switch for high-performance cluster computing.
In addition, software start-up Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, based in Orange County, Calif., has a flagship product, dubbed CallXpress, which is a unified communication application that combines data from voice, fax and e-mail messages in one system that a user can access via phone, wireless device or computer. "You can actually call into your voicemail system and get your e-mail messages read back to you," Kappes says. "It's pretty cool."
AVST's CallXpress, combined with ShoreTel IP PBX phones and Extreme's Ethernet switches, represents the gold-level IP telephony package for Milestone's midmarket customers at an attractive price point, Kappes notes.