The Virtual PBX market is hot. After eight years of seeding by a handful of leading providers, the market now finds itself in a perfect storm:* The addressable market is growing, thanks to the country's love affair with entrepreneurism;
* The core value propositions are easily comprehended by high and low tech buyers alike;
* The services get delivered from the cloud;
* The mobile phone IS our office;
* And of course Google Voice has pitched in with its marketing muscle and disruptive approach.
The Virtual PBX, or as some call it the Virtual Phone System, targets companies with less than five users, and mostly serves sole proprietor operations. At the core, the offer is inbound call management that allows business customers to provide phone numbers other than its mobile--and "sound big" by answering with professionally recorded menu greetings.
As barriers to entry continue to fall, competition is intensifying. Customer churn--outside of business failures--is relatively low, and margins are healthy so today's players are becoming more innovative in this land grab. Take a look at some of the branding and strategic packaging levers some providers are pulling to get ahead:
1. PhoneBooth (from Bandwidth): Recently launched a Freemium approach. The free service delivers much of what Google Voice does (or more) but with an upgrade stream as a business grows or requires more services, which is something Google cannot offer. Yet.
2. eVoice: One of the elder statement in the VPBX market, J2Global recently re-launched this product, reducing its pricing and growing the feature set in a effort to grow its footprint. It operates many brands, including OneBox that it now also considers as an upgrade path.
3. Grasshopper (formerly Gotvmail): A case study in making what is essentially a commodity product, cool. Grasshopper speaks to how this service enables an entrepreneur, and not to which features do what. It works well enough that others in the market seem to be following suit.
4. Line2: An offshoot of Virtual PBX provider Toktumi, Line2 is a mobile app that enables a second line on the smart phone and opens up WiFi calling. The mobile app provides built-in customer acquisition, with a natural upgrade path to the Toktumi services.
5. RibbitMobile: More focused on enabling carriers and other partners to go to market with this service, but available to the public. Their twist: presenting social information on the phone about the incoming caller. This concept is a ways from mass adoption, but presents a very logical evolution for a device that is a voice and data terminal.
6. FonGenie: This is a newcomer, packaged as a phone service that enables sales and marketing for small businesses (particularly service providers). Under the hood, it shares some similarities to a conventional VPBX, but its feature set and messaging focus on things like screen pop, automated caller interaction and CRM management. Good one to watch.
Bottom Line: If I wrote this 18 months ago, I would have concluded that we live in a boring, copycat market. Not any more.
Now if we could just find a better name for it...
