VAR Routes to VoIP Maryland

By By Robert Poe

A hot new driver of growth in low-end VoIP applications is emerging. The key players go by names such as value-added resellers (VARs), system integrators, IT consultants and the like. Usually small businesses themselves, they’ve been helping other small businesses with their technology needs for a long time.

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In the past, such businesses — we'll call them all VARs, for convenience — might have helped their customers only with computers and data networks, or perhaps only with traditional phone systems such as TDM PBXs. Now they're adding VoIP to their acts. Doing so often fills a hole in their business models, and represents a new route by which VoIP can proliferate in small companies.

One significant part of this emerging market involves hosted Internet-based IP PBX services. These offer the ease and convenience of traditional Centrex services, but add all the modern advantages of VoIP. Suppliers of such services include Packet8 and Vocalocity. All a small business needs is a broadband connection and an IP phone to get enterprise-level features and flexibility. The package also delivers the cost savings that made Internet telephony famous in the first place.

The other main part of the market involves open source IP PBXs. VARs load Asterisk packages onto Linux servers, install them in their customers' premises, set them up and keep them running. Fonality's open source trixbox is an example of such software. VARs used to download it and put it on servers themselves. Now they can buy it from trixbox owner Fonality, preloaded on a server, in the form of a bright green trixbox appliance.

The hosted model has significant attractions for VARs. The biggest may be that it provides recurring revenues. VARs' incomes no longer have to depend on upfront revenues for integrating and installing hardware, an approach that provides only inconsistent fees for maintenance or reconfigurations later. Rather, they can, as resellers, get paid a fee every month as long as the customer uses the service.

That doesn't mean it will replace their existing business, rather it will augment it, according to Vocalocity channel manager Brian Koles. "We're finding this kind of hosted PBX helps fill in the gaps where the existing solution sets haven't been able to sell very well," he says. "It has sort of created a new revenue space without replacing what a lot of the VARs and telecom brokers, as well as some of the IT consultants, have already been selling."

The premise-based approach also holds attraction for sometimes-skittish small business customers of VARs. For one thing, it gives them the option of sticking with analog connections. Instead of having their calls come in and go out over the Internet via a VoIP provider, they can hook their IP PBXs to their existing standard incoming phone lines. That means they don't have to rely solely on the Internet for all their calling needs. That may help persuade those still leery of Internet telephony quality, while still providing them with the advantages of VoIP switching.

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