[asterisk-biz] Hosted PBX

[Michael C. Hughes]

Hi Alistair,

I agree with you completely. If you have limited knowledge of the business and limited skills it can take quite a long time to launch a new venture. 

Additionally, I would never suggest to anyone that they blindly jump into a venture without adaquate training or preparation.  If they do they will most likely fail. That is where companies like your comes in. 

However, if you are a fully functioning ISP (not a VISP or a reseller) with more than a decade of experience in providing commercial hosted services then its not that difficult to add VOIP to your portfolio. And yes, I realize that there is more to this business than routing calls. If you think about it, ISP's are already providing tech support for Vonage users. A lot of us are also providing support for customers who have their own IP PBX systems (packaged Asterisk or hosted Asterisk). So if you know it, then you might as well provide it.

Mike. 



-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Alistair
Cunningham
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 11:36 AM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Hosted PBX


Michael C. Hughes wrote:
>you could be in business by tomorrow.

Michael,

If you can start a hosted PBX business in one day, I'll be impressed! 
I'd say a typical time scale for Enswitch customers starting hosted PBX 
services is:

- 1 to 2 months from contacting us to placing an order. During this 
time, the customer is exploring the demo system we give them, evaluating 
the market, drawing up a business plan, getting quotes for hosting, 
hardware, termination, etc.

- 1 week to order hardware.

- 1 to 3 days for us to install Enswitch depending on system size.

- 1 to 3 months to test, run pilot users, train support staff, write 
marketing material, etc. During that time, Integrics is often 
customising Enswitch to fit the customer's billing model, adding 
features specific to them, etc.

This comes to a total of 2 to 6 months, which I think is reasonable for 
starting a new business venture. Some of our customers do it faster, in 
a week or two, but they have everything ready go (particularly with 
regards to support staff and marketing) when they contact us, and they 
know exactly what they want.

If you do it all yourself, starting with bare Asterisk, you probably 
need to double that time to get to the same level of service. Routing 
calls is only a small part of running a hosted PBX business.

Alistair Cunningham,
Integrics Ltd,
+44 20 799 39 799
http://integrics.com/
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