“There is no reason to think that telecoms will be any different. Blockbuster are finding out that people don’t want to rent DVD’s, they want to watch movies. If they can stream them into their living room, why would they drive to the shops?
We talk about cloud and hosted interchangeably; fundamentally all the intelligence sits in the hosted network not the customer premises. A true cloud based solution is also a one-to-many relationship. You are not engineering an instance of the solution each time you add a customer.
However, hosted or cloud based services offer much more than simply a new access model. You are able to exactly map the customer requirement rather than rather than selling a closed bundle of services where the customer uses the bits that they need. There is already a widespread customer adoption of virtualisation in different part of their business. Hosted voice is a logical extension of this.
A by-product of the move to cloud is that it lowers the barriers to market entry for resellers and increases their geographic reach. As a plug and play solution, hosted VoIP lends itself well to internet generated leads, where the customer does not need to be in driving distance. In our own experience we have customers around the UK and worldwide, far beyond our reach if we were a London based CPE provider.
Our view is that growing demand for cloud services is part of a wider customer migration from platforms to ecosystems. The ability to knit different applications into the solution increases the reseller competitive advantage and makes it harder for other providers to replicate the services being delivered. At VanillaIP, our Uboss ecosystem combines a number of applications and add-on services, of which Hosted VoIP is one. The underlying principle is that the Uboss portal unifies all provisioning, device fulfilment and billing for multiple hosted services, from within a single interface.
Ultimately customers will drive the way the telecoms industry evolves.”