Providers Rally to Offer VoIP for Microsoft Response Point

Providers Rally to Offer VoIP for Microsoft Response Point
Cbeyond and New Global Telecom will offer leading digital voice service for small-business phone system Response Point.
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REDMOND, Wash. — April 18, 2008 — Industry-leading voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) providers are rallying around the Microsoft Response Point phone system to offer an easy-to-use, complete digital voice solution for small businesses. Today Microsoft Corp. announced that Cbeyond, Inc., and New Global Telecom, Inc. (NGT), will offer their superior digital voice services for Response Point. Small-business customers will be able to take advantage of simple, fully integrated VoIP service from these providers on Microsoft Response Point Service Pack 1 when it is released this summer.

“We’ve conducted thorough tests of the services delivered by Cbeyond and NGT and are pleased to align with these leaders and engage their channels to deliver Response Point as a complete VoIP solution to small businesses,” said Xuedong Huang, general manager of Microsoft Response Point. “Brought together, small businesses will experience all the benefits of Response Point’s magic blue button for voice dialing with the reliable voice services of these providers.”

Response Point chose to align with Cbeyond and NGT because of their focus on coverage, high quality of voice service and customer satisfaction. Each service provider uses the industry standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, which institutes a common protocol among digital voice providers worldwide and will boost quality of service and overall network health. Response Point customers will be able to take advantage of digital voice service based on SIP.

“Microsoft’s attention to detail in catering to the small-business segment makes Response Point a natural fit for Cbeyond’s Internet protocol-based voice and data applications,” said Rob Consolazio, vice president of Marketing and Business Development at Cbeyond. “Small businesses that combine our BeyondVoice with SIPconnect service and the Response Point phone system will gain the advantage of communication tools that big businesses enjoy, at an affordable price.”

Each service provider plans to roll out unique partner programs for value-added resellers that will bolster their ability to reach and service small-business customers with Response Point.

“We have designed the Digital Voice Partner Program to cater to the needs of Microsoft Small Business Specialists and are pleased to provide a nationwide digital voice program to the Microsoft community,” said Mike Donnell, president and CEO of NGT. “As a leader in outsourced VoIP services, NGT’s focus and core expertise is on providing our partners with complete communications for the small-business customer.”

Cbeyond and NGT both will participate in the upcoming Response Point 12-city training tour for small-business specialists and value-added resellers, offering tutorials and guidance on their services. Training information and registration are available at http://www.msreadiness.com/CourseDetail.aspx?id=9241. Response Point will continue to test additional digital service providers and evaluate their ability to provide high-quality, easy-to-use digital voice service to Response Point customers.

About Cbeyond

Cbeyond, Inc. is a leading IP-based managed services provider that delivers integrated packages of communications and IT services to more than 33,000 small businesses throughout the United States. Cbeyond offers more than 20 productivity-enhancing applications including local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet, mobile, BlackBerry(R), broadband laptop access, voicemail, email, web hosting, fax-to-email, data backup, file-sharing and virtual private networking. Cbeyond manages these services over a private, 100-percent Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) facilities-based network. For more information on Cbeyond, visit www.cbeyond.net.

About New Global Telecom

New Global Telecom, Inc. is the leading provider of wholesale hosted and trunk-based VoIP solutions in the United States. The company’s nationwide services enable VARs, cable operators, CLECs, and ISPs to deliver a high quality, complete communication solution to address business end-user needs. NGT’s Network Performance Platform is a cornerstone of the service suites, and is an industry-leading network approach to delivering predictable end-user quality. NGT’s digital voice services include a complete range of telephony features, nationwide phone service, worldwide audio & web conferencing, desktop fax services, E911 service, training and other support. For more information, please visit www.ngt.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Product review: Microsoft Response Point 1.0

Product review: Microsoft Response Point 1.0
Microsoft’s small-office VoIP system, buoyed by speech recognition, combines extraordinary ease and a restricted feature set

By Mike Heck

April 29, 2008

Microsoft’s Response Point is PBX software that runs on Embedded XP inside of hardware sold by three Microsoft partners — Aastra, D-Link, and Quanta — with more partners to come later in 2008, according to Microsoft. You can engage a VAR to install the system or do it yourself without much effort.

Response Point setup is remarkably straightforward, and so is day-to-day use. Thanks to an automated assistant that responds to voice commands, callers can do most anything with the push of a single button. The trade-off in keeping the system simple is a minimum of telephony features, and collaboration features such as presence awareness and instant messaging are absent.

Response Point requires Windows XP or Vista running on one PC; this functions as the management console. Additionally, each user may use an XP or Vista PC to take advantage of telephone functions and Outlook integration, but this isn’t a must because call routing and other configuration tasks may be done by your administrator. Also good: You don’t have to install separate servers, such as Exchange.

[ Read the review of Allworx 24x, Critical Links EdgeBox Office, Fonality PBXtra, or Sutus Business Central. Return to "VoIP phone systems walk the talk." ]

The Quanta Syspine DOS A50-8G base unit used for this review, like the Sutus Business Central unit, is a diminutive, attractive tabletop box that will fit into most any office décor. Installing a small system should take less than 30 minutes; just connect the base unit and phones to a network hub, and plug in your analog lines. The Syspine unit includes eight analog ports, and it supports PoE (Power over Ethernet), so phones don’t need to be placed near an outlet.

Next, using Response Point Administrator software, you configure the base unit, add users, and assign them to phones. But I was slowed by a similar problem I faced with Allworx: Administrator, 32-bit software, refused to run on my 64-bit Vista laptop. After finding a 32-bit XP system and loading the Administrator program, finalizing my setup proceeded quickly.

First, the phones on my network were automatically discovered. Next, I stepped through Administrator’s menus to assign handsets to specific users, groups, or locations (such as a conference room). There’s basic call routing for each user, such as forwarding to an outside line if the employee doesn’t pick up the call after a preset number of rings – but no options to have different greetings by time or day of the week.

Like other systems, Response Point has an auto-attendant and directory of users that I easily configured. For instance, I recorded custom greetings from a phone and designated an employee as the operator. Lastly, Response Point let me configure an outgoing SMTP e-mail server so that users would receive e-mail notification and an attached audio file of voice messages.

Surprisingly, there’s only minimal integration with Microsoft Outlook – and this requires each user to install Response Point Assistant (another 32-bit-only utility). Assistant correlates a caller ID with your Outlook contacts list and pops up their information. It also allows users to change voice mail, notifications, and call forwarding settings.

Besides voice mail, Response Point telephony features include call park/retrieval, three-way conferencing, and ringing all phones in a group. However, Response Point doesn’t support softphones.

During testing, Response Point performed without any issue. Up to eight concurrent calls were processed by the auto-attendant. The Syspine IP 310 phones provide a nice balance of usability and functions – with informative messages on the LCD, clear voice quality, and dedicated buttons for essential functions.

Response Point software lets users perform typical tasks from a phone, such as recording personal greetings. Moreover, the system stores about 100 hours of voice mail on the internal 500GB hard disk – messages that are accessed from a simple playback menu. I also appreciated the ability to bypass the auto-attendant when calling from an outside phone number to retrieve my voice mail.

If Response Point’s minimalist feature set might leave some unsatisfied, the built-in speech recognition will surely be a hit with others. Using technology from Microsoft Speech Server, Response Point is turned into a highly accurate voice recognition engine – without any additional setup or training.

To evaluate this feature, I simply pressed the blue button on the handset (which is part of the hardware specifications) and said something like “Dial Bob.” Every time I tried this with different names, the system dialed correctly. I liked the way you can park a call, go to another phone, and then retrieve it by saying, “Retrieve call,” or “Retrieve call two.” Call transfer works the same way, by simply speaking, “Transfer my call to Bob.”

Further, administrators can configure responses to three specific questions callers might ask, such as: “What is your location?”

Beyond cool, voice recognition comes of age with Response Point. That said, Microsoft’s solution will be most at home in small businesses already invested in Windows PCs and that need only a basic phone system. Specific to the Quanta hardware, you may need to purchase the optional Security Gateway for firewall protection, VPN, DHCP server, and QoS bandwidth management.

There’s talk of integrating Response Point with Microsoft Small Business Server. Microsoft wouldn’t discuss this, but I think it makes tremendous sense. After all, many potential Response Point customers are already running Microsoft servers, and this could bring collaboration capabilities to Response Point.

Microsoft has said that it will release Service Pack 1 for Response Point this summer. The free update will let you use Response Point to make outbound calls through an Internet telephony service provider, and will support Direct Inward Dialing to automatically route inbound callers to a specific extension. Plus, the admin client software will run on 64-bit Windows Vista and XP.

Microsoft Taps NGT, Cbeyond as SIP Providers for Response Point IP PBX

04/18/2008

Microsoft Corp. said Friday it has partnered with Cbeyond Inc. and New Global Telecom Inc. (NGT), to provide SIP trunking and other VoIP services along with its Response Point IP PBX, announced in October 2007, beginning this summer.

The partnerships will enable the respective channel partners of the companies to offer a CPE-service bundle geared to small businesses between five and 50 employees.

The two VoIP providers are the first to pass interoperability testing with the Microsoft IP PBX and will be included in the Microsoft Response Point Service Pack 1 when it is released this summer for sale through Microsoft Small Business Specialists, one of the software company’s indirect sales channels.

While Cbeyond already has an agent program of its own, NGT, a wholesaler, has developed the Digital Voice Partner Program specifically for the Microsoft Small Business Specialists selling Response Point. While the providers will be working to woo Microsoft’s VARs, they also will be able to introduce Response Point to channel partners, such as telephony agents, that might be selling SIP trunking products.

Interested channel partners can become certified to sell Response Point after a single day of training and an online assessment. Microsoft is beginning a 12-city training tour next week that includes not only sales and positioning for Response Point, but also for sales of VoIP services from NGT and Cbeyond. Cost for the training is $95. Partners that pass the test are listed on the Microsoft Response Point Web site and able to share in the leads.

Partners also must be agents of the VoIP providers in order to receive compensation for the service. In NGT’s case, becoming an agent is a simple matter of signing up via a Web-based form.

“Because voice over IP is so easy to learn for people who have backgrounds in networking, this is a great way for Microsoft Small Business Specialists to bring in a new business,” said Ben Brauer, senior product manager for Response Point at Microsoft. ”To sell a phone system is a cool concept for our small business specialist. Bringing a service into the mix makes it even more enticing. We already are getting a lot of interest from our VAR community, but I think this is going to make it even more interesting.”

For the Microsoft VARs the “interesting” part is developing an annuity revenue stream. “They get better services at a lower cost and Small Business Specialists can start to build an annuity revenue stream that allows them to grow their business year over year without having to expand the business or work harder to do that,” explained NGT CEO Mike Donnell.

In addition to basic local calling features like local number porting, directory listing, caller ID/CNAM and 911, NGT also offers partners the opportunity to sell toll free services and network-based desktop fax capabilities and on-demand audio and Web conferencing – increasing their residual commission.

In addition, Brauer said, the services can help partners justify the initial capital outlay for the phone system, which retails for about $2,500 ($3,000 with LAN optimization and installation). Microsoft conducted an ROI analysis and determined that the payback on the Response Point IP PBX sold along with a SIP trunking service can be swift. “What we found was that a small business with 10-19 employees would save upwards of $8,000 in the first year of deploying a voice over IP service. … So, they are already seeing an ROI within the first year,” said Brauer.

The bundle also is designed to be a low-maintenance sale for the partner. It includes auto discovery of end points and an automatic configuration tool for selecting analog service or a particular SIP provider.

Response Point is a software-based IP PBX that is packaged as an appliance by three OEMs – Aastra Technologies Ltd., DLink Corp. and Quanta Computer Inc. DLink’s channel is being trained to sell the appliance and Aastra, whose channel targets enterprises, is developing a small business channel to sell the system as well, Brauer said.