On the show floor here, situated right beside the huge Cisco booth, a Sarasota, Florida-based start-up is making their first appearance here at VoiceCon. They offer a unique solution that blends hosted service with on-site capabilities for the SMB market.
In the IP Contact Center Market Overview session on Tuesday, I talked about the fact that while in the past there were two business models to choose from – hosted or owned – IP and SIP technologies are enabling companies to create customized combinations of the two. In the contact center space, that often involves having an in-house set-up that handles most traffic combined with outsourced or hosted resources that are used during times of peak demand.
Star2Star has created a novel approach to the combination of hosted and on premises assets, one that allows users to gain the benefits of both. As CEO Norman Worthington explained it to me, a carrier hosted solution means an employee who may be calling someone three cubicles down has that call traverse to and from the network to be completed. In order to make a premises-based solution reliable, a business must bite the bullet and design in redundant servers and multiple carriers.
Star2Star starts with the StarBox, a relatively tiny, fanless on-premise PBX that supports up to 200 extensions and unlimited voicemail. Using DSL, cable, T1 or fiber, the StarBox is connected to the Star2Star data center that not only backs up the on premises equipment but provides network services as well. Star2Star is providing an end to end, application and network services solution.
Star2Star comes with a host of bells and whistles including web-based administration, customer service queues, paging, customized music on hold and voice mail that is delivered to email boxes as WAV files. What’s unique is that the things that are best done locally can remain local and those best done at the data center, like carrier-grade resiliency and backup, are done there.
To help with the go-to-market strategy and implementation, Star2Star has brought on industry veteran Graham Potter whose career has spanned the carrier (British Telecom), PBX (SDX Business Systems, acquired by Lucent/Avaya), and contact center (Aspect) worlds. Stop by booth 610 and check them out.
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