SME market Critical for Vcomm ambitions

VoIP distributor looking for greater slice of SME pie

Voice over IP (VoIP) distributor Vcomm has signed Portuguese VoIP vendor Critical Software to boost sales in the SME market.

Critical will be distributed solely through Vcomm in the UK and will come to market with new VoIP software for Vcomm’s reseller base.

The vendor’s latest release, EdgeBOX 4.0, operates as a VoIP platform for the SME and branch office market, which combines voice, data and networking in one device.

Peter Tyndale, business development manager at Critical, described the release as an “office-in-a-box”. He claimed the firm can succeed in the crowded SME VoIP space.

“The SME market is huge in the UK, but there is a need for the SME market to take advantage of the latest networking technology.

“There is a lot of competition in the market, but we have the right combination of features that small businesses are after,” Tyndale claimed.

Major vendors such as Cisco, Avaya and BT have all earmarked the SME VoIP space, but Tyndale insisted that Critical can find its niche.

“Many vendors offer just pure IP, but we provide the networking infrastructure. We are also offering a compete office application that SMEs can afford,” he said.

Scott Dobson, managing director of Vcomm, said: “There are a lot of integration products that are data-centric, but we struggled to find one with a VoIP capability. I do not expect Critical to sign another distributor in the short term. As we grow, service providers are a market that Critical is keen to get into.”

Dobson identified the retail and education sectors as huge vertical markets for Critical, but insisted that EdgeBOX is a horizontal application for a start-up organisation that cannot afford rival vendors’ products.

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