Stuart Corner
Sunday, 15 July 2007 17:51
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
RequestDSL grew rapidly eventually being bought out by PowerTel (which has now been bought by AAPT). Sykes and others who, he says, "did not want to move from Melbourne to Sydney" founded iProvide. "We put a business plan together in late 2004 and talked to a number of players and I think AAPT had the strongest desire and probably the strongest need," Sykes told me.
One of the first things iProvide did was to recognise that going through the traditional telephone equipment providers was no longer the way to reach small business. "The way communications is evolving for the SME sector is becoming very IT centric," Sykes says. "It is the IT guys that are out there interacting with small business: they have much more interaction than the PABX or key systems suppliers There is not the same rate of change as in the IT space. That continuous interaction is fundamental if you want to have a new distribution capability for telcos to SMEs."
However, this is not to assume that voice telephony is something that can easily be picked up by these players. "The voice skills is really the value add that we bring: we show them how to bring voice into an IP world and with their frequent contact with their customers and the high levels of trust they enjoy they become a very powerful channel." iProvide runs monthly training sessions for its channel partners in all capital cities
The core offering is iProvide Office which Sykes describes as "a suite off offerings ranging from something as simple as replacing a four telephone lines to a fully hosted offering with a VPN coupled to it."
AAPT has been offering hosted IP telephony on a BroadSoft platform for several years, but according to Sykes, as configured it was totally unsuitable for the SME market. "We have substantially re-engineered the product for the SME market. There is no way you could have taken that and offered it to SMEs: the CPE was too expensive and the processes were too manual."
