“As a converged VoIP service, resellers can offer all of the benefits of running voice and data on one pipe, whilst strengthening their existing proposition and increasing recurring revenues,” said Neil Watson, Channel Director, Viatel. “Additionally, a large barrier to adopting VoIP in the past was the capex involved with the purchase of an IP gateway, but with SIP trunking this is no longer needed. Consequently, resellers save on infrastructure and set-up costs. With the economic downturn in progress, now is the perfect time for resellers to offer these services.”
The service is currently aimed at Mitel resellers, which make up 24% of the IP PBX market, with support for other PBX vendors to be added in the future. The new service from Viatel is fully managed and offers resellers peace of mind by processing all calls via a Nortel CS2K soft switch. The service runs over an unshared connection such as SDSL or Ethernet, in order to ensure that customers gain high quality business voice calls indistinguishable from traditional voice calls.
The service will be of particular interest to voice resellers looking to get into data services. As it runs over an MPLS IP VPN, it provides the opportunity for resellers to offer services over VPNs, including online backup, storage, or CRM and ERP applications. The new service can also be combined with Viatel’s new call recording product, auto attendant or IP Centrex functionality and offers more intelligent features than are standard with ISDN such as “fail over routes”.
“Viatel is an established channel player and with half of our business coming from our partners we are continually looking for ways to support the channel,” concluded Watson. “The addition of SIP trunking and most recently call recording is part of our continuing effort to help them expand their capability and reach.”