Jazinga Eyes Small Business VoIP, Cheers On Competitor Microsoft Response Point

Randy Busch, chief executive officer of a Toronto-based VoIP startup, says he’s not worried at all that software giant Microsoft (News - Alert), also a new player in the Internet telephony game, is targeting roughly the same business segment that he is.

 

Just the opposite, in fact.

 

Here’s how Xuedong Huang, general manager of Microsoft’s communications innovation center, described his company’s thoughts on targeting smaller businesses for its Response Point product during one of the Internet Telephony & Conference’s biggest announcements.

 

“They believe that is the segment with the greatest opportunity, and it’s also an under-served segment,” Huang said during an announcement from 8x8 Inc. that Packet8 SIP-based VoIP services are now part of Response Point.

 

For Busch, one of a dozen telephony veterans behind Jazinga – a widely praised, year-old company whose product is set to launch on Tuesday – bringing Microsoft’s brand name to VoIP should help accomplish what no one else has been able to: Make small businesses aware of Internet telephony.

 

“We never came into this figuring we’re going to be the only players in this market, and we actually think it’s terrific,” Busch said of Microsoft’s introduction of Response Point earlier this year, during an interview with TMCnet at the ITEXPO (News - Alert).

 

“I’m not sure that Costco that would have been my first choice of a channel to get into,” Busch added, referring to one of the retailers that 8x8 and Microsoft are considering for their joint product. “But right now I’m sitting back. I’m their biggest cheerleader right now. I really hope they succeed, that they – like Vonage (News - Alert) and Skype before them – are going out and building these markets and raising awareness, which can only help us. I think we’ve got a richer suite of functionality in our product.”

 

Features include many of the fully functional VoIP services that users have come to expect, such as voicemail-to-e-mail, music on hold, call transfer, IVRs, auto-attendants on multiple levels and a text-to-speech engine to generate auto-attendants. Jazinga’s (News - Alert) product also includes a unified communications portal for the user, so he or she doesn’t have to hit a feature key on their phone and transfer functions.

 

The Jazinga product is appliance-based and designed for businesses of three to 20 users, and it’s going to be a little less expensive than Microsoft’s product, Busch said – in part, because it’s built on a platform that’s less expensive.

 

It’s also designed with the value-added reseller in mind.

 

“The kind of product we’re building is something that a user could take home and install themselves,” Busch said. “No IP, no Mac addresses. Just plain, simple-language wizards to install the product. But the extensibility allows VARs to become part of it as well.”

 

Busch said he and his team targeted the up-to-20 user small business because there’s a lack of services available for those enterprises. Large enterprises are well cared for, he said, and medium-size companies can avail themselves of services from hosted and local providers who may create Asterisk (News - Alert)-based, open, or custom-based solutions. Some of them are downsized versions, and hosted service providers. A

 

“But one of the things we found very quickly was that, first off, a lot of these hosted service providers quickly discovered that they’d build the infrastructure, and they found that to sell and support a 10-user implementation is the same cost to support a 100-user implementation, and very quickly they moved upstream,” Busch said during the interview. “As a matter of fact, in some areas, they’ve got minimums of 10 users or 15 users before you can even become a hosted customer. So the more we looked at this, the more we realized that the small customer is under-served.”

 

Echoing subtexts that have run through talks and presentations throughout ITEXPO, Jazinga is focused on affordability, reliability and ease of use.

 

Jazinga’s platform and REST-based middleware forms the foundation of its flexible and extensible product.

 

“The middleware and API have been designed for power and ease of use,” company officials say. “The middleware abstracts and exposes all features of Jazinga products for provisioning, management and integration with third party products whether existing or created specifically to work within Jazinga. The API has been created in such a way as to be familiar to developers who are already integrating with Web Mashup APIs.”

 

In a recent interview with TMC President and ITEXPO Chairman Rich Tehrani, Busch said its appliance received rave reviews from beta testers.

 

“This first release will be specifically designed for small businesses but will be followed soon after by another appliance specifically designed for home users,” Busch told Tehrani. “Busy households will soon have a cost effective unified communication appliance providing distinctive rings, individual voicemail boxes, voicemail to e-mail, privacy management and many more features available to them while at home or anywhere in the world they and their family members happen to be.”

 

For now, Busch is watching – and hoping that Microsoft’s product takes off in the same way that Vonage’s VoIP service has, with one exception. Most consumers still aren’t aware that Vonage is an Internet telephony product.

 

“I think they (Vonage officials) had a great opportunity to be a different kind of phone company, but all they did was start offering VoIP with the same kind of plans,” Busch said. “So I think they blew that opportunity. But I think they have raised the fact that there are low-cost alternatives. Skype another good example, but we’ve got a lot of work to do. Thank goodness Microsoft is out there promoting it. We’re going to do our best to promote it. We’re working through VAR channels right now, because there’s nobody walking into a Staples or Best Buy today looking for a phone system. But I don’t think it’s that far off. I really look at this industry as a parallel to the wireless networking industry.”