Take Action: New Gear From Actiontec Gets VoIP Down to Business

Paula Bernier
11/01/2006

About 98 percent of businesses in the United States are SMBs, and less than 10 percent of those businesses today use VoIP. But a little company called Actiontec Electronics Inc. is trying to change that by educating the SMB set on the benefits of VoIP and by offering some neat new PBX gateways designed for small-scale applications based specifically on Skype services.

Actiontec’s VoSKY Exchange 9040 and 9080, new versions of its Skype PBX gateway for SMBs, hit the street just last month. The stackable devices add four or eight outgoing Skype lines to the office PBX, allowing users to make and receive free and low-cost long-distance and international phone calls over Skype.

“We know from listening to our more than 75 million customers that 30 percent of them are regularly using Skype for their businesses and most of these are small companies,” said Niklas Zennström, Skype CEO and co-founder in a press release announcing its business VoIP initiatives earlier this year.

While Skype does not distribute Actiontec’s gear, which instead is distributed by more than 20 resellers who in turn work with VAR distribution partners, Actiontec said VoSKY Exchange is Skype-certified and is the first such solution that enables businesses of 10 to 300 employees to take full advantage of Skype's VoIP service. The product requires no changes to existing PBX equipment, phones or user PCs; can be installed in two hours; and allows users to make and receive Skype calls on their regular office phones instead of using a PC and headset.

Because Skype is already widely used, there’s an existing user base of customers that also want to apply the service in their business environments. Yet for the SMB environment “we’re the only game in town now” in terms of an affordable PBX gateway, says David Tang, Actiontec’s director of business development. He adds that for those customers not already online with Skype, the fact that Skype’s basic service is free makes it easy for them to download the client and try the service without entering a credit card or making a commitment.

Actiontec is trying to educate SMBs on all this through blogs, seminars and outbound call centers, says Tang.

The new Exchange gear, which is powered by itself, adds to the company’s earlier Exchange gateway, which was USB powered. Other new features with the VoSKY Exchange 9040 and 9080 are a stackable, rack-mountable form factor; an eight-port option; the ability for a single USB port on a Windows PC to support four outgoing Skype lines rather than requiring one USB port per line; call-log statistics and reporting capabilities; control of all Skype lines from a single screen; remote management; and easier setup for multiple offices and restoration.

OTHER STATS

Only 18 percent of single-site companies use VoIP, compared with more than 70 percent of multi-site companies that use the technology to some degree, according to a survey just released by Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice of more than 100 executives at SMBs in consumer business, energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, public sector, real estate and telecom/media/high tech.

A September 2006 Savatar study reports that while the SMB market is showing some growth, 17 percent of SMBs out of 560 companies surveyed have deployed VoIP versus 15 percent in Q1 2006 and 12 percent in Q3 2005. Savatar posits that for those who haven't yet made the jump to VoIP, there is confusion about what solution to buy and from whom to buy it, saying t70 percent of SMB decision makers are still unclear where to turn for the best VoIP options.

Actiontec Electronics Inc. www.actiontec.com

Skype www.skype.com

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