Hosted Made Simple

Rob Murdoch, Sales Director, Pipecentric

Rob Murdoch, Sales Director at Pipecentric, believes that hosted voice services are easy provided resellers choose the right partner.

Pipecentric has found that some resellers need more than encouragement to take on hosted telephony solutions; some are in need of a ‘leg up’ to get on to the bus that is taking the channel in to a new era.

“Customer support and installations can be very expensive or resource hungry for many resellers contemplating the adoption of a hosted telephony service into their portfolio,” says Rob Murdoch, Sales Director at hosted telephony supplier Pipecentric. “We have found that in a lot of cases these two issues alone are putting off resellers from selling what has now become a very mature and solid customer application and a viable alternative to traditional CPE based telephony solutions.

Murdoch says that of all the reseller types working in the channel it is the minutes reseller that best understands the hosted telephony monthly commission model.

Managed Hosted Telephony

“These resellers should be ready to take on hosted telephony as an alternative or additional income stream and in order to transition resellers to the hosted model in a cost effective way Pipecentric has launched a new service called Managed Hosted Telephony.

This new service provides resellers with a secure service wrap for themselves and their customers leaving the reseller free to focus on what they do best – selling.”

Managed Hosted Telephony from Pipecentric delivers the three key ‘must haves’ for resellers entering the hosted market, namely:

• Installation of the Pipecentric hosted telephony solution
• Provisioning of the solutions to meet customer requirements
• Ongoing service, support and maintenance.

“This is a similar model to the minutes resale market in that the reseller carries out first line support for customer queries to quickly identify the fault and Pipecentric then carries out second line support through to fault resolution.”

Site Monitoring

Pipecentric has also invested in another key element of the hosted revolution in that they supply a user site monitoring solution to enable resellers to remotely check on the status of the DSL circuits supplying the service so that a proactive service ethos can be deployed.

Murdoch says that typically the cost for their Managed Hosted Telephony service is a one-off fee of £150.00 which will cover Pipecentric engineering staff going to site with the reseller to set up the hosted telephony system.

“Resellers will source their IP phones, routers, switches and all other premises based equipment from Pipecentric as well as the DSL circuits required. The preferred DSL supplier we use is Griffin Internet and we have a range id IP phones available from Polycom and Linksys.”

The Linksys range f IP phone

Value Added Services

As well as an established and reliable Broadsoft based hosted telephony platform and the Managed Hosted Telephony Service Pipecentric has a number of other value added services they can deliver for reseller clients.

“We have a Remote Call Forward service whereby a London geographic number can ring a phone anywhere else, say Glasgow for example. Through our reseller web based portal the reseller can set these diversions themselves for their customers – it’s a simple process.

For the growing call centre application market we also have a solution that includes skills based call routing – a service normally only found on very

Polycom’s SoundPoint IP430

expensive CPE based solutions. Pipecentric’s call centre application includes a comprehensive call reporting package for users as well as live call statistics all on a per agent per month basis.

What Resellers Say…

Rob Murdoch is keen for resellers to hear what others say about his company’s services – from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

Lee Cassidy is Managing Director of SD Voice and Video (formerly Skills Developer), a company he started in 2004.

“We have worked with Pipecentric for the past 12 months delivering reliable and feature rich IP Telephony to a diverse group of customers. Pipecentric have provided exceptional support for our commercial activities through education of our sales staff, the education and technical support of our technical staff, allowing us to become very selfsufficient in the design, deployment and operation of services.

The Pipcentric team are very professional and supportive to our needs responding quickly to any issues we encounter, they have also been very

Polycom’s IP320 IP Phone

flexible commercially to help us deliver cost effective solutions with realistic levels of margin.”

Jeremy Rollinson is company founder and Managing Director of Wireless LAN Source, a company that has established a niche market in supplying hosted telephony services to the expanding music festival sector. Rollinson had a historical association with VoIP provider Pipecentric so it was to them that he turned to when it came to telephony provision

“They have one of the best platforms available and worked very closely with us on speeding up the verification process for the Linksys SPA range of handsets we deploy.

The music festival business is a high pressure environment – as soon as the power and lights go on we are expected to get the telephony and Internet connectivity running immediately – some days we work 20 hours or more.

We are very familiar with the Pipecentric VoIP platform and consider it to be one of the most stable and reliable on the market. Not only do Pipecentric provide a proven solution which interoperate with our wireless solution seamlessly– which we have deployed in very challenging and high profile sites where any problem would be instantly visible but the range of features is constantly being added to.

We have worked extremely closely with Pipecentric in the last 12 months and they have been fantastic in their support of ourselves and our clients – we seem to work very well as a team and together deliver a really tight solution for our customers.”

The DSL Provider Endorsement

Andrew Dickinson, Sales and Marketing Director, Griffin Internet says that as a Platinum Certified Partner with Griffin Pipecentric has achieved a very high standard of technical and sales expertise and are among Griffin’s top performing partners.

“An early entrant into the hosted voice market, Pipecentric has developed a focused and practical approach to selling VOIP through the channel. Griffin supports Pipecentric’s approach by co-sponsoring and hosting educational road shows aimed at building and developing their reseller channel.

Pipecentric is an ideal partner to trial new products in Griffin’s Engineered Broadband range since these are primarily designed to manage QoS on DSL and aimed at the voice and voice reseller market.

For More information:

Call 0808 178 8220
email: rob.murdoch@pipecentric.co.uk
web: www.pipecentric.co.uk