Gamma’s recently launched PhoneLine+ offering provides partners with a chance to jump on the opportunity around ‘The Big Switch Off’, according to its new Channel Sales Director, Andrew Smethurst.
Ten years ago, BT Openreach announced it would be switching off its PSTN and ISDN networks in favour of IP voice services. To counter this, Gamma designed PhoneLine+ for “micro businesses”, replacing their traditional landline service with VoIP technology, delivering voice calls over the broadband network.
“These micro businesses are very used to just having PSTN lines, or at best they might have a very small PBX or an ISDN,” Smethurst (pictured above) told UC Today.
“It’s predominantly these PSTN services that PhoneLine+ looks to replace and that is because of what's happening in the not too distant future.
“This specifically fills that gap between dial tone only and a full-blown PBX that is being shoehorned into this space. There's a huge opportunity here for the customers that need that little bit of feature enhancement and for partners to provide their customers with a greatly enhanced service to the one that they're currently experiencing.”
The new service is accessible through a range of devices, including the traditional desk phone and offers traditional features such as call divert, call hold and personalised voicemail. It allows users to set up and use multiple numbers, and offers real-time call analytics and easy access to the portal.
The new offering is aimed at thousands of micro businesses across the UK and offers partners the opportunity to start the conversation with customers about what their plan is with regards to the switch-off in 2025.
But if partners don’t grasp the opportunities around the big switch-off now, they may likely see their lunch being taken by their rivals, Smethurst warned.
“Resellers grow organically and I think that there can be quite a long tail of customers from where a company has grown, and often those customers are sat on these legacy services that don’t provide huge amounts of revenue margin to the reseller by customer, but they do by volume,” he elaborated.
