[Asterisk-biz] Buying hardware from China...

[andres at itranser.com]

Greg,

I really appreaciatte your answer and advice.

May be I did not explained very well about my intentions.  I want to build 
Asterisk PBX, sell them and install them over my country. I will not sell 
directly "SIP" minutes, in fact, I really contacted several menbers of 
this list to known his offers and launch this services throught them. What 
I would like is to offer the service on a spanish web page, to reach my 
market, so I would like to resell minutes from some other company, but if 
possible, with a page that althought hosted on theirs installations, can 
be with my own brand and more important, on spanish language.

The fact to want to distribute also equipment is to be able to impulse 
Asterisk on the spanish market and on my region. Note that whenever I have 
to buy hardware, I have to do it on "foreign" pages, always on english, 
and pay for expensive shipping expenses. Also my costs to produce my 
Asterisk servers are bigger, and if i want to do the installation on a 
customer that requires 100 IP phones, cost of change is high, so they are 
reticient to do the change until I do not have showed them a lot of 
adventages of the system.  Since there is no cheap IP phones alternatives 
on the Spanish market, not spanish based shops, this is a stopper for 
Asterisk to be known inside and have the opportunity to obtain customer 
confidence.

So my ideas where: a).-  BASE my business on selling services around 
Asterisk installations, b).-  MAKE the peopel aware that there is other 
alternativies to traditional PSNT throught reselling Minutes for another 
company (not doing that personally), and c).- OBTAIN cheaper equipment. In 
order to obtain cheaper equipment, I think (as an option)  that it may 
help to resell a lot of them, so that´s why I was thinking on reselling 
some of them, but that would not be the main focus of my business, since I 
can not compite there with other people. However, I would add, on this 
last option, the valuable option of offering equipment on a spanish based 
web, and so make the spanish user more easy access to this market (that 
would help me to make the Asterisk to be known and therefore, sell more 
services).

You can see that I did not want to compite on C) since I was asking for 
help to sell equipment together.  I insist that my business would be A.  I 
would appreaciatte any help regarding points B and C (so I can focus on A, 
but being able to offer my customer a packaged solution).

Any suggestions, again, would be welcome (or any collaboration proposal on 
the points I explained).

I really think that your point is very good, Greg, and in fact, wanted to 
let you known that we are thinking similiarly (althought due I am not a 
native english speaker, may be did not explained it very well).

Kind Regards,

Andres




Greg Broiles <gbroiles at gmail.com> 
Enviado por: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
16/09/2004 23:09
Por favor, responda a
Greg Broiles <gbroiles at gmail.com>; Por favor, responda a
Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion 
<asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>


Para
Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion 
<asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
cc

Asunto
Re: [Asterisk-biz] Buying hardware from China...






What if, instead of trying to do a little bit of everything, you got
really good at doing a single thing, and worked with other people who
were also good at their respective competencies?

If you are trying to be in all three of the hardware, minutes, and
consultancy/services markets, you make it a less attractive
proposition for other people to work with you, since you are competing
with them (no matter what they're doing). On the other hand, if you -
for example - decided to be a hardware distributor/reseller, you might
be able to team up with VARs/consultants who need a source for
hardware, and make cross-marketing deals with companies who sell
minutes/DIDs.

It's also a lot of work for you and your staff to become competent to
sell and support three different sorts of things to the different
kinds of customers.

I realize that's not really the question that you asked, but it's what
jumps out at me from your message.

-- 
Greg Broiles, JD, EA
gbroiles at gmail.com (Lists only. Not for confidential communications.)
Law Office of Gregory A. Broiles
San Jose, CA
_______________________________________________
Asterisk-Biz mailing list
Asterisk-Biz at lists.digium.com
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/attachments/20040916/70238a7a/attachment.htm