Recently, I read an article at forbes.com talking about VoIP and how a small business in Cincinnati took advantage of VoIP based system from Cisco to upgrade itself, look professional and add remote employees etc. That got me thinking about the price. They paid 12K for the Cisco system which could have been achieved in under 2K (for their size) using Asterisk and FreePBX. Feature by feature, open source Asterisk has everything they needed!
- Remote Extensions
- Voicemail to Email
- Softphones
- Call Routing
Here’s an opportunity for players like us to penetrate the small business telephony market. As I see it, major hurdles are
- Marketing and Brand Recognition
- Service Guarantees
Marketing and Brand Recognition
Most smaller businesses are handicapped for Marketing dollars. We’ve to get ingenious about letting the world know of our presence and services. Thankfully, at least for tech businesses, there is google and the ‘Inbound Marketing’ – which basically says you’re only as good as your google rankings. Google is the most visible marketing channel today using it effectively is not a luxury but a requirement. It’s imperative to spend time and money on google SEO and maketing.
Service Guarantees
How do we compete against big names like Cisco and Avaya when it comes to service and reliability? The argument that we should be extending to our prospective customers is that the service guarantees are indeed a function of your SIP trunk vendor and not really come from Cisco. On a day to day basis, you’re dependent upon the VoIP carrier which provides Inbound calls to your premises and Outbound termination to PSTN. It has nothing to do with Cisco. We help our customers find the most reliable VoIP provider for their needs and maybe have relationship with multiple carriers for redundancy.
The Equipment itself consists of an Intel PC and can be as reliable as the customer wants. A high end custom PC made with top of the line components can be had for around $1000.00 (for a 10 person company, this would suffice). Still MUCH cheaper than Cisco equipment. Pair it with an UPS and a QoS server for another $1000.00 and you’re in business! The PCs, especially, ones made with high grade components are quite reliable.
If the customer insists on extra guarantees, one can even setup a redundant server with fail-over option – something Cisco won’t provide without significant extra dollars!
I think, especially, in these tough times, when every business, small or large, is forced to do more with less budget, such moves make even more sense.
So, if you’re looking to save money and still sound professional to your customers, it’s time to give Asterisk a try!
