On the wire this morning, a confusing press release from Linksys about Linksys One. Linksys One is an end-to-end small business hosted PBX offering. If you are:
- A CLEC, ITSP, or some other kind of service provider, Linksys offers hosted voice, voice mail, email, conferencing, and a variety of other services that you can sell to your customer.
- A VAR, Linksys offers new services and hardware that you can install at your customers site, in conjunction with a service provider partner.
- A small business, Linksys offers inexpensive but full featured plug and play voice grade routers, hand sets, and VoIP gateways and a suite of compelling services.
This is a pretty dramatic step up. It will put immense pressure on Natural Convergence (a direct competitor), and Tekelec (acquirers of VocalData, another direct competitor). Neither of these have CPE businesses of their own, and must partner for these elements. Does the Linksys offering compete with Cisco Call Manager also? What about Microsoft Small Business Server, and hosted versions of Exchange and / or LCS?
It will also place pressure on the new generation of small business PBX / router products that are starting to emerge, from companies like Epygi and Talkswitch. These solutions will be less expensive than a hosted solution from Cisco and an ITSP, but they will be forced to compete with the Cisco channel, and the revenue share that a hosted solution will kick back to that channel.
For more information, Tom Keating has blogged an excellent interview with Linksys VP Marthin De Beer with a lot of depth.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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It seems a new phase of battlefield in SoHo and SMB Market.
Apart from leading suppliers such like LinksysOne and D-Link xStack IP telephony, some smaller players GotVMail and pbxnsip PBX also are competing in this huge potential market segment.
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