The communications market has, for the past half-decade, gone through a product-focus metamorphosis of sorts, with an increasing number of vendors looking to capitalize on the vast SMB market – one that was largely ignored for a long time in favor of the enterprise market. In some ways, it made sense: one enterprise sale could be the equivalent of hundreds of SMB installations. The fact, though, is there are a limited number of those large enterprise customers and a seemingly endless supply of SMBs looking for similar capabilities at an affordable price point.
Several enterprise-class vendors have sought to downsize their offerings to take advantage of the SMB opportunity – some reasonably successfully, yet others with only limited success. The one challenge they all face is it’s not very easy to scale down a costly enterprise product to the point where it meets SMB needs from cost, feature, ease of use, and support perspectives. Of course, there is the hosted and managed services alternative, which has become popular, and which enterprise vendors have been able to leverage... Read More
