Hosted voice: a year in the channel

Graham Harris discusses change in the hosted telephony market over the past 12 months

We launched our Hosted Voice Exchange (HVX), a BroadSoft-based cloud telephony offering, into the cloud market last January.

Throughout the first few months, there was unsurprisingly a strong focus on reseller recruitment and product training as the service taxied down the runway. It takes time for resellers to gain confidence in a new offering.

During the second part of last year, we witnessed a growth rate of 20 per cent per month. We see this success as built upon a number of key factors.

To ensure the success of a new product, you must lay the right foundations: channel understanding, increased reseller support activities, and a progressively rounded service.

Education and recruitment go hand in hand; a reseller will not adopt a new product without understanding it. It is a key objective of ours to continually develop ways of streamlining the education process while maintaining the quality and effectiveness of the knowledge transfer.

Since it is a relatively new technology, there was a high demand for hosted telephony training and therefore we have introduced two training courses per month, one in the north and one in the south.

Once you have resellers on board, the focus changes to ensuring they have everything they need to sell successfully. By appointing a dedicated head of pre-sales support, we were able to instil confidence, boosting resellers in their first experience of supplying the service.

The emergence of a more focused product specialist team also played a key part, allowing us to deliver scalability to the HVX operation.

The HVX service itself has developed over the year and now offers a monthly priced call statistics package that can deliver real-time business information. This statistics package, alongside mobility, call recording and CTI integration capabilities, means there is no longer a gap between it and premises-based PBX.

In fact, when combined with the resilience and inherent disaster recovery facilities that HVX has to offer, it is clear hosted voice can present far more to the modern business than the traditional PBX.

Throughout the year, the market moved from early adopter to early majority, a surge that is set to continue. There is no specific reason for this step change, undoubtedly the increased availability of competitively priced and robust data connectivity, including fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), has had a massive impact.

Customers have been able to benefit from reduced costs but still experience the excellent call quality of a hosted voice system.

Another development that we have seen in the past 12 months is the increasing desire from end customers to minimise asset ownership and ensure the predictability of spend. Businesses have become increasingly keen to move away from spiky capital expenditure and are turning to subscription-based models for more services.

2014 proved to be a seminal year in cloud telephony as a tipping point was realised. Moving into 2015, the market looks extremely exciting for HVX and other cloud-based products.

We are already witnessing an encouraging uptake of the hosted desktop service we launched last October and hopefully in nine months' time we will have a similar success story to tell.

Graham Harris is product director for cloud at Daisy Wholesale