 |
 |
| Scott Dobson |
VCOMM is a Berkshire-based distributor focusing on the IP telephony market. Established in 2004, the company provides value-added products and services to the reseller and Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) communities built around communication, collaboration and convergence technologies. In 2006, VCOMM secured £150,000 of government funding through its small firms grant scheme. The award is testament to VCOMM’s potential to exploit its position as a key player in a fast growing market niche, and the strength and vision of its management team. VCOMM will be investing the funding in a marketing and communicaitons programme to promote the broad range of products in its portfolio, and drive awareness and uptake of VoIP amongst the business community.
Product
VCOMM has built a broad product portfolio that includes best-of-breed vendor solutions in the areas of predeployment, deployment and post-deployment. Resellers can offer customers a complete IP telephony solution or select a specific product depending on the customer’s specific needs.
Pre-Deployment
- Viola Networks NetAlly VoIP provides WAN network assessment tools to ensure the WAN is capable of supporting VoIP. If a capacity issue is brought to light in this assessment, Expand Networks Accelerators can be deployed to deliver WAN performance improvements as well as ongoing QoS, monitoring and management.
Deployment
- Once the network has been made ready, a decision needs to be made by the customer. This decision is whether or not to refresh the PBXs to take advantage of the applications and productivity gains IP telephony provides, or keep the legacy telephone system in place and utilise a toll bypass gateway solution to pass internal calls across the WAN free of charge.
- edgeBOX and Pandora Networks provide CPE and hosted PBX solutions while VegaStream, Polycom, Sipura, Elmeg and Snom offer a complete range of core and CPE solutions to enable toll bypass, remote access and long line extension-based services via IP.
Post-Deployment
- If securing the firewall and NAT traversal are of paramount importance to the customer, VCOMM promotes the Ingate and Intertex range of SIP-aware firewalls and SIParators. These devices can manage IP calls from outside the enterprise ensuring that no unauthorised access to the secure LAN is made.
- If the customer is looking for ongoing monitoring and management of his IP voice traffic, NetAlly RealTime is the product of choice. RealTime allows full integration with traditional network management tools and provides ongoing testing, proactive fault finding and reporting for all traffic across the WAN.
- Lastly, VCOMM represents CallRex from Telrex, a software-based IP call recording and monitoring platform. CallRex is able to provide cost-effective IPbased call recording for almost-all of the leading IP PBX vendors including 3com, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, Nortel, Siemens etc.
| Vendor Partners: |
| - Clipcomm - www.clipcomm.co.kr |
| - Critical Software - www.criticalsoftware.com | - Sipura - www.sipura.com |
| - Snom - www.snom.com |
| - Expand Networks - www.expand.com | - TelRex - www.telrex.com |
| - Ingate Systems - www.ingate.com | - Vegastream - www.vegastream.com |
| - Intertex - www.intertex.se | - Viola Networks - www.violanetworks.com |
| - Pandora Networks - www.pandoranetworks.com |
| - Regular “boot camps” at VCOMM’s Newbury office to give resellers early sight of new vendor products and provide comprehensive training - Ongoing training and support from dedicated account managers - VCOMM’s website provides a wealth of information on the IP market to allow resellers, ISV partners and end users to get up to speed on trends and try free demos of new VCOMM products |
Why VCOMM?
Dobson says that VCOMM can help resellers sell into new markets by providing value-added services such as training, support and consultancy around specialist areas of IP telephony.
“We have focused on the IP telephony market since 2004 and are well placed to provide resellers with the market’s very best solutions to take to their customer base. Although we are also seeing some interest at the enterprise level due to its specialist knowledge of IP telephony, VCOMM understands the needs of the SME and can provide relevant solutions at the right price point.
“Datamonitor has claimed the VoIP market will be worth $2.6bn in western Europe alone by 2008. 2006 will be the year that VoIP enjoys mainstream adoption in the small – midsized business bracket. VCOMM is seeing increased interest from across its reseller base from their SME customers in the business benefits of using VoIP, together with a strong commitment to invest in the right technology.
“VCOMM wants resellers to see the benefits of VoIP for themselves in order to understand its potential and take VCOMM’s VoIP solutions to their customer base.We are therefore offering a number of incentives to raise awareness of VoIP in the channel such as our new Worksmart partner programme which includes a whole host of benefits to partners who wish to become accredited to sell the Worksmart range of solutions. VCOMM is offering a completely free 10-user PBX to all partners who join the accreditation programme, plus free trials of its VoIP platform,Worksmart (RRP £11.95 pppm). Additionally we are offering a free ‘Express Talk’ softphone based on the SIP standard allowing free calling between users of any VoIP service. Features include caller ID, an answering service and a phone book function.”
 | www.vcomm.co.uk |