A year out of the gate, Unified Office is going after the 10-100 space with a high-quality VoIP offering sold through channel partners, and has now added an optional analytics suite.
Portsmouth, NH-based MSP Unified Office, which offers hybrid cloud-based virtual office services to SMBs through a variety of channel partners, has announced the availability of its Visual Performance Suite analytics offering for its Total Connect NowSM service.
“The SMB for VoIP is a huge market, but is highly fragmented and hard to get at,” said Ray Pasquale, Unified Office’s Founder and CEO. “The VoIP market is still only 17 per cent penetrated. Many of the channel guys who sell to them have still been pushing PBXs, and so the market filled up with low quality players, offering cheap rates for low quality phones, which held the market back and tainted customers. Cisco did a good job at VoIP but only within the building. We saw an opportunity to get into the SMB, by building a very high quality product that’s reliable. We want to reinvent the market with a high quality device.”
Total Connect Now is a managed communications service that integrates voice, video and messaging around a cloud-based architecture for the SMB to better manage their operations.
“We build our own border controllers in the cloud for uptime and quality,” Pasquale said.
“We target the 10 to 100 employee company, which is 55 per cent of the market,” Pasquale added. “The Avayas and other big players are focused on the 100 up market, and the 10 and under market is large, but is too hard to get at profitably. To get at it our target market we have to leverage channels, with a nimble agile service that can handle real time complexity.”
Channels are critical to Unified Office’s success, but getting the right partners has been a challenge.
Ray Pasquale, Unified Office’s Founder and CEO
“We can’t do this without channels,” Pasquale said. “We went to market over a year ago, and acquired between 20-24 resellers of various types over the last year and we culled that down dramatically. We are back to about 20. We have none in Canada right now, but that’s an interesting prospect for us.”
The Visual Performance Suite, the new analytics suite, provides a real-time view of changes in operational performance levels and actionable intelligence for managers and owners, so they can determine business performance in real time and take immediate actions and apply continuous operational improvements. Pasquale said that it will provide customers with the ability to assess unstructured data in real time to gain competitive advantage.
“It’s really critical to capture this data in markets where the companies have no power to make price increases,” Pasquale said. “It allows the manager or owner visibility in real time at the company, or individual locations. They can see how many people are in hold queues, so they can re-allocate resources. All kinds of metrics can be assessed – the language of the caller, call length, average time to answer, and abandonment rates.”
The Visual Performance Suite is available now, and is sold separately from the basic service.
