London-based Spitfire Network Services has repositioned as an ISDN30 grade VoIP provider in a move that reflects the company's ambition to grow beyond its roots and accelerate a shake-up in the way businesses communicate.
All VoIP providers come to market with high ambitions but few as lofty as Spitfire's 12-month campaign to double dealer numbers for its proven business class ISP services. According to Tom Fellowes, Sales Director, resellers operating under Spitfire's wing will soon find good margin in ISDN30 grade hosted VoIP, backed up by a one-stop-shop support network.
He believes that there is a significant number of comms dealers who would rather not bill customers directly, who are not interested in the intricacies of billing platforms, and who say ‘no' to the worry of bad debt risk. "We are here to help the 40 per cent of smaller dealers that don't have the infrastructure or capital, who would like to resell our service and not bill the customer, and get commission in return without any of the potential hassle that is sometimes associated with billing. What we offer works. We are a business ISP, as well as a BT interconnect operator, and all aspects of the service are looked after by Spitfire in-house."
"The single most important aspect of VoIP is bandwidth"
Spitfire entered the comms market in 1988 selling Panasonic telephone systems. The company then grew its equipment business, taking on Avaya and Nortel. In the late 1990s Spitfire moved into service provision, marking a telling change in emphasis for the business. In September 2000, Spitfire launched a Tier 2 ISP business as one of the first providers of ADSL. In 2001, Spitfire took the decision to get its own switch and interconnect with BT. Both voice and data businesses blossomed with significant revenues coming from the channel. Spitfire Network Services has achieved rapid organic growth over the last eight years and last year turned over £14.4 million. Now the company is aiming to increase that growth amid accelerating end user and partner demand for guaranteed ISDN30 grade hosted VoIP.
Fellowes commented: "The single most important aspect of VoIP is bandwidth. We haven't connected anybody with less than G711. The circuits have guarantees of ISDN30 quality, built in resilience and disaster recover at half the price of ISDN30. Any SIP provider using a third party SDSL connection, with guaranteed QoS and 1:1 contention will struggle to offer a meaningful saving compared with ISDN30e. Having enough bandwidth enables us to guarantee quality. We are putting a maximum of 14 SIP calls over a 1:1 2Mb SDSL with QoS. Other SIP providers will try and put the same amount of SIP trunks over an ADSL circuit."
As Spitfire provides all parts of the service it is able to deal with every aspect of fault handling, such as re-configuring routers, putting in additional DSL circuits, resolving numbering and porting issues etc. "Our overriding aim is to ensure that every SIP service we put in - whether SIP Trunks or our hosted solution SIP Communicator - is genuinely ISDN30e quality. This ensures all our staff, dealers and end users have absolute confidence in the service," added Fellowes.
Spitfire has set out plans to forge closer strategic relationships with resellers on a high-touch model. The move reflects an assumption that, in time, demand for hosted VoIP and SIP services across all levels of the business community will eventually outstrip sales of more traditional hardware-based systems. And the swiftness with which Spitfire is moving to welcome new resellers on board shows a commitment to its strategy and where the market is heading.
In equally determined and confident mood, Fellowes is embarking on a campaign to address vendors that insist on traditional methods of system production, where ISDN cards form the primary circuits while SIP trunks play second fiddle as back-up channels. "Another big push by Spitfire is to talk to vendors and turn things around so that SIP is the primary circuit and ISDN becomes the back-up," he said. "Emphasis is always on ISDN. This indicates that vendors collectively aren't 100 per cent happy with the quality and availability of business class SIP. We will talk to those vendors and demonstrate that SIP does work. The significant cost in the build of a system is the ISDN30 card. If vendors are able to scrap this cost they gain a price advantage over rivals."
Fellowes confronted old challenges that a hosted solution may not be as lucrative as a traditional system sale, arguing that resellers who don't incorporate a true business grade hosted VoIP solution in their product kit bag will at some point be playing catch-up. "Comms dealers will come up against data resellers working on a different business model. For them voice is another application, and they can afford to add and support voice. From a comms dealer's point of view, something is better than nothing, and if you can't beat them, join them."
On paper, the business case for hosted VoIP is a no-brainer from the end user perspective. And despite step-by-step traction in the market early indications suggest a big hit in the long-term as one-stop-shop SIP providers such as Spitfire become the norm. "Most SIP services at present are being delivered in a piecemeal way, with the underlying Internet connection coming from a different network operator to the actual SIP service. As the larger operators move into SIP, including BT 21CN, we will move towards a situation where more SIP services are delivered by a single provider in the same way that Spitfire delivers its own SIP service."
One aspect of Spitfire's channel development strategy is to hold partner seminars. The next event, scheduled for 2nd July 2009 at the Marriott Forest of Arden Hotel near Birmingham, aims to give existing and prospective channel partners full details of Spitfire's range of end-to-end SIP products including a live demonstration of SIP Communicator, Spitfire's hosted telephony system, plus the launch of new broadband products including ADSL2+, Annex M and SDSL Mstream. Spitfire now has a Midlands sales office in Redditch to support partners. The Midlands seminar follows two successful seminar events held in London earlier this year.
Nick Goodenough, Partner Service Manager, said: "Demand for SIP-based solutions from the channel is strong and increasing. Communication providers are keen to partner with suppliers that can offer a full range of services coupled with strong support. The channel has been responding positively to our service offering."