Voiceflex has its sights fixed on Microsoft partners to take its Teams offerings to market in 2022.
“Microsoft Teams is going to continue to grow. The number of opportunities we’ve got there is very, very large, and that’s growing,” said Paul Taylor, Sales & Marketing director at Voiceflex.
“We’ve got around 2500 SIP trunks lined up for applications in January. We have some very high profile organisations which are testing at the moment, as well as some large government establishments. That’s going to continue.”
Additionally, between October 2020 and October 2021, sales of Voiceflex’s Teams direct routing offering increased by 80 percent.
“We’ll find a lot more standard resellers will start selling Teams into the sub-50 tenant market. We’re looking to make it as easy as possible to put those applications in and make that journey really easy for them,” said Taylor.
Launching a hosted platform
Taylor was sharing Voiceflex’s roadmap for 2022 with UC Today. Also on the agenda is the launch of the company’s own hosting platform this year.
“One of the prerequisites was it had to be compatible with Teams,” he explained. “There are hosted products out there that have a substandard interconnection, where they are using a piece of middleware that doesn’t interact completely into it. It’s commonly known that SIP trunks will start eroding simply because of the amount of people now using online applications to make calls.”
“We need a hosted platform in our portfolio because not everybody is going to come on through Teams. To have a stable telephony application with the back-up of Teams works in a lot of instances”
Elsewhere, Taylor said take-up of Voiceflex’s Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SoGEA) platform is “going great guns.”
Essentially a direct replacement for PSTN, SoGEA is a standalone, data only app. This means users can connect to the internet without a copper phone line, delivering a single order version of Fibre broadband. Sales are being boosted by the increase in employees working from home, he said.
“Again, we’re going to put a lot more emphasis on that in 2022, because we’re seeing a big take-up of people putting two data connections into their homes. One to use for their own entertainment purposes, and one for business. People aren’t looking at screen blocking and screen freezing because they want the experience to be the same as it was in the office. That application is going to continue to grow and our fingers on SoGEA voice and FTTP are very encouraging. So that will be a major growth path for us for next year.”
Voiceflex Partner Panel
Voiceflex is also looking to engage more with its partners in 2022. This will include establishing the Voiceflex Partner Panel. With seven partners already on board, Taylor said these will “act as our eyes and ears on the ground.”
“We’re looking for feedback on what they think we need in the marketplace – and what they want us to provide. We want our partners to tell us what they want to be developed moving forward. Our development map is very much about customer interaction.”
