Why You Should Sell UC As A Managed Service

By Jay McCall, networking and managed services editor

Sometime within the past couple of years, the term ‘VoIP’ has gone out of vogue. With so many VARs experiencing shrinking profit margins, IP telephony vendors were wise to focus the discussion on convergence, unified communications, and other services. I recently spoke with Adam Cole, CEO of Votela, which is a unified communications vendor as well as a combined carrier and North American distributor of Siemens OpenScape Cloud Services. Votela offers UC solutions as a service, which are geared toward
VARs and MSPs selling into companies with more than 50 seats. I asked Cole some probing questions to help you determine whether this is something that you should take a look at.

How is a UC-as-a-Service solution different from other solutions?
It enable resellers to get in the business of selling UC and cloud services without having to make a huge infrastructure investment. We partner with Siemens, which has two redundant installations of its OpenScape UC Servers running in each of its four geographically distributed data centers. Siemens also provides the desk or conference phones and we bundle Votela’s software and services, which automates the billing, carrier provisioning, and taxes. Plus, we offer five levels of services, starting with Voice SIP (session initiation protocol) which is just basic phone service and ending with UC Advanced, which includes HD UC, web collaboration, and voice conferencing in addition to features such as simultaneous
ring, find-me, follow-me, and call prioritizing/routing by number.