Cloud based hosted telephony and Lync

Cloud based hosted telephony

“Cloud based hosted telephony will not displace CPE PBX telephone solutions in the short, medium or long term” 

says Mark Shane, Sales Director at ICON.   

"ICON supplies the channel with the Wave CPE IP-PBX and the FortiVoice small business IP and analogue PBX solution,  but”  says Mark  “we are not talking up the market just because we supply CPE solutions.  It’s because of our of experience in supplying the endpoints market and our own hosted messaging solution that we are convinced that CPE solutions are here to stay”  

ICON provides endpoint solutions which can be deployed in traditional CPE environments or as a voice mobility upgrade for the basic endpoint provided by the hosted supplier.   Few of these KIRK solutions are being installed on a hosted solution.  The majority, if not all, are going onto CPE equipment.  These KIRK handset solutions can also be deployed in remote offices in a quasi-hosted solution by connecting then remotely to the CPE IP-PBX at head office. However, most companies opt to provide remote office communications using the multi-site capability of the IP-PBX solutions such as the Wave and FortiVoice IP-PBX solutions.

“In the channel the popularity of hosted telephony does not to seem to be as great as the hype would suggest” says Mark

Microsoft Lync

In the case of Microsoft Lync Mark believes that it is early days with regard to claiming it a success in the channel.   

ICON distribute the only Microsoft approved voice mobility endpoint solution for Lync solutions and although pundits claim that Microsoft is one of the top 3 suppliers next to Cisco and Avaya ICON is not seeing this reflected in its sales of KIRK handsets for Lync.   

“However,” says Mark “in our view Lync is due to be the next big thing in the market and the fact the channel has not yet embraced this solution as fully as it should does not mean that it will not become one of the top channel solutions.  ICON is already gearing up for Lync’s success and can provide and support channel partners with KIRK handset solutions needed by Lync”