Hosted VoIP Providers Need Hosted IP Applications

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How Do You Beat Falling Prices?

You innovate and or add additional service offerings. In this month’s Mercator Capitial newsletter, there is an excellent piece about Hosted VoIP. The most outstanding part of the entire article was this,

…the market opportunity for the SMB is more about hosted IP services – what we like to call “HoIP” – than it is simply about VoIP. As in the consumer VoIP market, it is less about voice, and more about bundled services. For the SMB market, we do not believe it will be the best VoIP offering that will win; rather, we believe it will be the best bundled offering of Internet access, fax services, web and email hosting, remote storage and backup, managed firewall and VPN, and mobility in addition to hosted VoIP that will ultimately prevail.

As many have said before, voice is just one of the pieces to the IP pie. In order for Hosted VoIP providers to continue to survive and grow in a marketplace that has voice prices falling to zero, they need will have to bundle other IP services, becoming a HoIP provider, not just a hosted VoIP provider.