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| All Aboard |
Comms Business Magazine was invited to attend the recent HIPCOM reseller partner event held in London. Along with some forty delegates, editor Ian Hunter was brought up to date with developments, partnerships and new opportunities before boarding the bus for lunch at Claridges.
Founded in 2005, HIPCOM is one of the original channel players in hosted telephony. Having more than stayed the course the company has grown to become a marketleading provider of next generation voice services in the UK.
Their innovative platform is in essence, an ecosystem of pre-integrated voice-ready application services that include; hosted IP telephony, SIP trunking, call recording, Microsoft UC-Connect, business continuity solutions, service assurance and Web 2.0 voice applications.
HIPCOM set out to tell their partners about how they are developing and driving new applications through to their channel and creating real opportunities for them in unified communications applications and SIP-based overlay services.
Mark Purdom, Regional Vice President for Broadsoft Northern Europe, reminded us of his company’s pedigree; market leader with some 30% revenue share, supplier to 18 of the top 25 worldwide carriers and 450 customers in 65 countries. Broadsoft by numbers is impressive; with 30 million users deployed and more than 500 technology partners the company is profitable and growing.
Looking specifically at the UK market Purdom advises resellers to sell the business proposition and not the product. “Solutions have evolved over time from PBX to IP PBX through to hosted PBX and now unified communications. The OPEX model is gaining market traction with its pay-as-you-go principles and ease of adding new seats and services we now have the ability to empower users with a seamless communications tool.
“In the UK 10% of new seats supplied are now hosted with particular success being found in verticals such as managed offices, government, education and retail. In terms of applications trends we observe that the top three would be unified communications, enhanced SIP services and mobility.”
James Brind, CTO at HIPCOM, told delegates that his company are the first to offer truly agile communications; one platform that seamlessly integrates cloudbased services, on-premises CPE and mobile devices. The firm has 98% SIP trunk interoperability with UK PBX systems.
“All this means that reseller can protect the lifespan of their customers by positioning themselves for advanced service overlay to get the flexibility to mix ‘n’ match product portfolio services within customer environments as and when you needed to.”
HIPCOM was keen to point out that resellers can develop their own brands and build business value.
Strategy Director Paul Aabryn, “HIPCOM makes impressing customers simple. We have automated service delivery so your organisation can get next generation services up and running in minutes. Portals are branded with your business identity and are feature rich yet easy to use. Workflow engines guide you intuitively through the order journey and system tasks track milestones so the right people in the organisation know what is going on at all times.”
The event was held at the impressive Polycom Centre of Excellence near Liverpool Street station and Phil Jackson, Business Development Manager for UK, Ireland and Benelux, unveiled the new Video as a Service (VaaS) product with HIPCOM which is set to further build upon the unified communications and collaboration applications already available.
Phil Sawyer, Managing Director, at Leigh-based reseller Digital Exchange Products, commented, “Customers today face many business challenges and the effective use of technology can help them overcome many. Hosted communications applications such as these from HIPCOM offer the small to medium enterprise user an easy way in which to join up an effective solution for their business simply and cost effectively.”
Following the presentations, which were timed to precision, delegates were taken by private double-decker red London bus to Claridges to dine at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant so it was Cordon Bleu service all round! To complete the day’s events Simon Ramport of New England Telecom won a brand new shiny iPad 3 in the prize draw.