Smith On VoIP

There Are A Million Ways To Skin A Cat

At least that is what the say. But how do you know if you picked the right way?

As we learned in part one of this series, the ip phone system marketplace is not the utopia some vendors make it out to be as the vendor themselves face many difficult situations, scenario and decisions along their path to succeeding in selling their phone system. For many, the path to success goes straight through the value added reseller (VAR). In part two of this series, we take a look at the VAR and where or not they should roll their own IP PBX solution from an open source telephony platform.

How Dumb Can A VAR Be?

It is a Friday. You know, the ones that seem to drag on forever? I am sitting at my desk wrapping up my day when at get a call. It is 6 pm est. “Hi, yeah, I need to place an order for one of them asterisk servers, a dual T1 PCI card, 35 Polycom ip phones and a couple of PoE switches…and I need it sent next day air.” Typically, these are the types of phone calls sales folks love to take and over the last few years, they have happened a lot (not anymore since I don’t do much inside sales work anymore). But this particular call, although it happened well over a year ago, still sticks in my mind.

You see rather than just take their credit card and shipping them their hardware, I decided to probe a little further. “So, your putting in an asterisk system this weekend, huh?” The customer boasts, “Yeah, I just closed a deal. Big money and I saved the customer a whole bunch. Part of the deal, though, was I had to have it installed by Monday morning.” Fair enough, I thought, but surely a big league VAR would have planned a little further ahead right? “So, do you do a lot of installations like this?” There was this momentary silence, followed by a sentence I will never forget, “Nope. This is my first, but I have played around with Linux before, I mean how hard could asterisk really be.”

I should have stopped right there. I should have never sold to the customer. But he insisted and argued with me for the next ten minutes. There was no stopping this guy. He was going to roll his own solution based on asterisk and install it this weekend. He never did. In fact he never even got the system working. Unfortunately for this customer, he lost his customer. Lesson learned? if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t even think about rolling your own solution. It just is not that easy.

Roll Your Own or Join A Channel?

Okay, so I definitely picked the story with the worst possible ending to start this off, but I need to make a point. As a VAR, you need to seriously consider whether or not you are capable of rolling your own solution utilizing one of the open source telephony platforms. Open source platforms sure are tempting, after all they are free, but for many they can be a death trap.

Selling someone else’s product, however is not all that it is cracked up to be. After all, you are dependent on them for everything. In hitching your wagon t one vendor, you are hedging your bets that as time continues and the industry moves forward, that the vendor you choose is going to continue innovate and stay ahead of the curve. There are many a phone system vendor who have failed to do so and became obsolete. You wouldn’t want your business to become obsolete because of it? Of course not.

Neither choice is perfect, but if you are a VAR and you are considering offering a IP PBX system, here are a list of questions to answer before deciding whether to roll your own solution or join someone’s channel:

1. Do You Have Advanced Linux Knowledge? - If you are not a Linux savvy or not have someone on your staff that is, forget the open source solutions. You won’t even get your solution off the ground.
2. Can You Support The Solution? - when you roll your own solution you write the manual and you are responsible for all three levels of technical support. Are you staffed to handle this? Most VAR’s are not as they have historically looked to vendors to provide level two and three support.
3. How Strong is Your Marketing? - Although most technologists think us marketing folks are useless, if you are rolling your own solution, you better have some marketing fire power in order to get your solution out to market. Remember, end users care less about the tangible aspects of the phone system, than the intangible. End users don’t buy asterisk boxes because they think they think Linux rocks.
4. Can You Handle Interoperability? - When you roll your own solution, you have the ability to select the right phones, ata’s and service providers in order to make your system work. This is not always easy to do. The testing required to get everything right is often costly and time consuming. Ask yourself whether you have the time and money to do this. Most don’t.

What About Hybrid Solutions?

The companies behind the open source telephony platforms have started to wake up and realize that most VAR’s can not truthfully answer yes to all of the questions above. This has prompted them to offer solutions that give VAR’s the feel of openness, with the security of a closed offering. These solutions, such as the Asterisk Appliance from Digium and trixbox pro from Fonality offer VAR’s who have advanced levels of open source telephony knowledge the flexibility that open source offers with the support that VAR’s need in order to be successful.

To date, these hybrid options have been popular and they are certain not out of the question, however they are not for every VAR. Even though they are easier than a pure open source platform, if one can not truthfully answer yes to all of the questions above, you chances of success are greatly reduced - this means you need to look to joining the channel and getting the canned solution that will give you a better chance of success in your marketplace. Tomorrow we take a look at joining a channel and what to look for in a vendor partner.

Like This Post? Subscribe Via RSS Feed and Never Miss Another Post!