NEWS

BT Wholesale launches next generation IP Voice Service

SPECIAL REPORT

BT WHOLESALE’S launch of its IP Voice Service is a key indicator of the maturity and popularity of hosted VoIP and SIP trunking. BT’s Director of Products and

Enterprises, Alex Pannell, told Comms Dealer that the IP Voice Service has undergone extensive testing and refinement, and that he’s been working with 12 resellers in the SME channel in preparation for the wider market. “We started trialling it 12 months ago,” said Pannell. “We have around 1,200 end user SME sites connected to our service. We wanted to understand how the product worked in the market and the best retail price points and how to support and sell these services.” Companies such as Daisy, Comtec, Azzuri, Cavendish and Swains were all involved with the trials, which Pannell describes as ‘a great success’. The key feature for IP Voice, says

Pannell, is a ‘zero touch’ approach to the provisioning portal. “What we’re delivering is a multi-tenanted self-service portal around the call servers and the core functionality,” he added. “What was important to us was to have the ability to serve at the lowest levels.

Yealink in Avaya link

YEALINK has been selected by Avaya for membership in the Avaya DevConnect programme. Andrew Roberts, CEO of

Yealink (UK), commented: “Mem- bership in Avaya’s developer com- munity will help us develop and supply products that will meet the customer’s requirement for quality and value. “Building on Avaya resources

and working with the company to deliver compliance-tested solu- tions to the market, we are able to provide high quality, low cost SIP end points so businesses can quickly realise a benefit to their bottom line.”

ber of Centrex-based VoIP seats by 2013, growing from current levels of around 360,000 seats to over two million. It also expects the number of

Alex Pannell

So our resellers can use a white label portal to delegate responsibil- ity for certain areas down to their customers, or if they wish to keep a managed service then they can include that as part of their propo- sition too.” There are plans to integrate

the IP Voice portal into similar gateways for CPE and connectiv- ity ordering too. Pannell noted: “Obviously we want to provide a turnkey solution because our ulti- mate goal is to provide a single SLA to all components of a BT provided service in one place.” Interest in hosted services is

growing fast, according to BT’s research figures. It estimates a more than five fold increase in the num-

Chess gets number 45

CHESS Telecom has bagged NPC Telecom, bringing the total to 45 acquisitions in the past six years. According to Richard Btesh,

Chess Director, the firm’s acqui- sition success is the result of a combination of skilled integration and customer retention. He said: “Importantly, the flexibility to tai- lor deals to fit in with the sellers’ requirements gives us an edge. “Market consolidation means our list is always growing and our flexibility and reputation enables us to approach increasingly significant targets. 2010 continues to be an exciting and challenging year for all of us at Chess.”

SIP trunks to increase by a fac- tor of 10 within two years, from 51,000 channels to 570,000. As a long-term replacement for ISDN, the market potential is in excess of four million SIP lines. “The ‘year of IP voice’ has always been about to happen,” says Pannell. “But what we’ve found over the last 12 months is that broadband speeds from all sup- pliers are increasing exponentially, and the economics of running voice over a data pipe make sense. “Particularly in the SME space,

people are finding it hard to get hold of funding for capital infra- structure, and switch manufactur- ers are charging some customers large amounts of money to upgrade PBXs which is driving them to IP Centrex solutions.” At the heart of IP Voice is a

Broadsoft switch. Pannell says the switch is robust enough for mil- lions of users at a time. At present, there’s limited sup-

port for Microsoft OCS integra- tion through Outlook and IP Voice supports Salesforce.com API calls, but Pannell says more features will

be rolled out under the branding Enhanced Voice Services. “I’m specifically trying to avoid using the term ‘unified comms’ as it sometimes confuses our industry,” he said. “Many resellers want to do the integration themselves but they need us to provide the tools. We need to make sure we’re clear with our resellers where we want to play in the value chain.” BT’s new IP services don’t

require end-to-end connectivity to be taken from the carrier. Instead, they’ll be platform agnostic when it comes to access. It’s a shift towards a service-based model which Pannell believes is key for end users with international offices, but which also anticipates any potential changes to the structure of wholesale access to the Openreach network. BT Chairman Ian Livingston

has already signalled that the com- pany is happy to talk about duct access with Ofcom as a way to speed up the rollout of fibre services. “We can either accept that LLU has happened or we cannot accept it,” commented Pannell. “And we have to recognise that people will take a mixed approach to access. Having a portfolio we can sell off the top of our own connectivity and other people’s connectivity is important to us.”

Servassure wins key distribution contract

SERVASSURE has won a contract with major convergence distribu- tor Micro-P to provide installation, maintenance and professional ser- vices support for Micro-P’s portfo- lio of products. Servassure’s MD, Steve Walsh

Hill, commented: “This is an excit- ing new venture and opens up new avenues for us. We have engineers UK-wide ready to serve our new client and have offered a dedicated portal that will create quotations quickly and easily, and help find information on other services.” Alex Lister, General Manager for Communications at Micro-P, added: “We have grown our busi-

Steve Walsh Hill

ness significantly based upon pro- fessional customer service, consis- tency of execution and integrity, which very much mirrors the values of Servassure. We now have another quality service to add to our portfo- lio of products and services.”

www.comms-dealer.com

Dealer gets top marks in school deal

PENNINE Telecom, working in partnership with an OGC Catalyst partner, has won a competitive ten- der against more than 10 other national suppliers, scooping a £1m- plus contract to install telecom- munications, network and wireless infrastructures at the new £67m Deane Road campus at Bolton Community College. For Pennine Telecom’s MD

Andrew Roberts it was a case of going back to school. The fast growing vocational and further education institution was instru- mental in developing his career. The agreement saw Roberts

return to the college where he first studied for a City & Guilds certifi- cate in Radio and Television servic- ing in 1976, and which secured him his first job at Pennine. Roberts commented: “It’s gone

full circle. Bolton Community College arranged my first interview at Pennine which got me a job repairing radios on the bench, and ultimately resulted in me leading an MBO to buy the company some 27 years later.

“I will always be grateful for the education and support I received, and the trust and confidence which the College has placed in Pennine Telecom through a contract which will provide them with cutting edge communication technologies.”

Union Street’s extra support

UNION Street Technologies has appointed two Billing Managers to provide on-site support for users of its Abillity billing platform. Rob Bristow brings over eight

years billing experience having started with Oak Telecom in 2001, rising to Abillity Support Manager. Toni Nurse also has over eight

years experience in call billing principally with the ATC Group, where she was Billing Manager using the Abillity billing platform. Tony Cook, MD of Union

Street, said: “Although use of the Abillity platform is intuitive, users require on-site help to reinforce the training we provide in their own working environment.”

8 COMMS DEALER JUNE 2010

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