The hospitality sector will provide partners with viable new business opportunities once the market for VoIP solutions becomes saturated.
That is the message from TigerTMS CEO, John Owen, who said that thanks to the COVID pandemic, hotels are more interested in softphone capabilities and welcoming a bring your own device approach to the communication methods in rooms.
Earlier this year, CounterPath partnered with TigerTMS to provide its Bria softphone solution to the hospitality industry. Speaking to UC Today, Owen added that there are too many telecoms providers for the traditional market to support.
“The large telecom providers are fighting for a bigger share of a smaller market every year that’s shrinking fast,” said Owen.
“New UC players, who don’t have the legacy infrastructure, are growing quickly and there’s going to be a period of consolidation in the market, no doubt about it because too many players are fighting over too small a market”
“In hospitality and hotels, the telephone system itself now is an intercom system, between the guest’s room and room service, or concierge or reception but very rarely would anybody use the telephone in the room to make an outside call. Hospitality is moving towards a cloud offering now and the more enlightened hotel groups have already started to make the change.
But hospitality is generally a very slow industry to change and they will sweat the asset as much as they possibly can. We have over 18,000 hotels using our software, all over the world, and in America, we are still deploying software solutions against analogue PBX and analogue telephone systems. So we’ve had to reverse engineer our software to come with a 25- or 30-year-old telephone; their attitude is, if it ain’t broke, why change it.
That is what we face in certain markets but other markets like Scandinavia and Australia are embracing cloud UC solutions into hotels, they are ahead of the rest of the world. Adoption is patchy but certainly, it’s moving in that direction.”
