EWeek: “Businesses turning to managed and hosted services for a smooth path to voice over IP are discovering an uncomfortable reality—not all offerings are enterprise-strength. Of the 400 VOIP service providers in North America, only a handful deliver services that can be considered business-grade, such as IP PBX support, business broadband VOIP or VOIP over IP-VPN.”
The model just hasn’t been proven, you’re right. But it’s the next Hotmail when it does. Once the industry realizes a method to leverage all of the existing pops, like a network such as Primus, then the hosted IP PBX features offered at a yearly fee or next to free will cause a rush of people going into the service. From an enterprise point of view, yes it’s a hard sell. Going with consumer based products you will benefit faster and work closer to the dollar than being the enterprise company unless you are a Guru of VoIP and promise to personally hold the hand of the companies you are deploying day and night. Consumers are more forgiving and have no problem putting 60 – 300 dollars a year extra on a credit card. That’s my 2 cents.
Ryan Gibson, VoIPBlogs.com