Hosted VoIP

 

In the race among service providers to differentiate IP communications offerings, some competitors are targeting the customer relationship management (CRM) market. Integration with CRM systems is common in large enterprises and even smaller companies have embraced the concept.

Now, small business customers utilizing a hosted solution have access to a cream-of-the-crop hosted CRM package: SalesForce.com. 8x8’s (News - Alert) Packet8 service now integrates with Mark Benioff’s creation.

 

What does this mean for the market? Simple: powerful services are becoming available to smaller and smaller business customers.

An early computer telephony integration (CTI) link that allowed similar functionality was developed in the late 1980s, and required an IBM mainframe and a Rockwell automatic call distributor (ACD). This type of setup cost $1 million or more.

 

(An aside: the ACD division of Rockwell was sold years later to Concerto, which became Aspect (News - Alert) and recently received a Microsoft investment.)

Later, in the 1990s, CTI (News - Alert) became more popular. Novell and Microsoft provided links to their operating systems which PBX and ACD manufacturers used to provide similar functions. Entry-level cost? Maybe $20-$30K.

Today, it is possible to achieve similar functionality for less than $1,000 per year. Even the smallest companies in the world can now compete effectively with the largest.