With worldwide SIP trunk sales exceeding $14 billion in 2019, and growing 7% annually, it isn’t a big surprise that there are many SIP trunk providers competing for a piece of the pie. Barriers to market entry can be low for new vendors. Pull-through sales (attach rates) are often good. And profits are potentially strong according to an Eastern Management Group study,
“2018-2024 SIP Global Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis.”
In Eastern Management Group’s 2019 SIP trunking customer satisfaction study, we evaluated 29 SIP trunk vendors that account for the majority of all sales. These companies include broad portfolio vendors like AT&T, Comcast, and Cisco, and niche providers such as Flowroute.
Eastern Management Group asked 3,000 IT managers to evaluate their SIP trunk vendor on numerous customer satisfaction measurements in three principal categories: product, vendor experience, and customer delight. We then performed side-by-side comparisons of all 29 providers. The study’s findings are available in the Eastern Management Group’s "
2019 SIP Trunking Customer Satisfaction" report and models.
Flowroute Ranked #1
Customers chose
Flowroute as the top-ranked SIP trunk vendor for 2019 – receiving four stars in multiple measurements and beating the overall industry average. In Eastern Management Group’s 2017-2018 customer satisfaction study, Flowroute finished second.
Flowroute has a loyal customer base and scored well in all size markets, including enterprise – which our research shows accounts for a smaller proportion of Flowroute’s customers than customers of larger competitors like AT&T and Cisco. We think at least 80% of Flowroute’s customers may have fewer than 100 employees, while at AT&T and Cisco, just 40% of their customers are of a similar size.
While Flowroute scores high in satisfaction servicing and supporting enterprises, Flowroute is a big competitor in SMB markets that may be largely ignored by others. This includes businesses with between one and 50 employees, based on our survey, and one to two employee branches, common in vertical markets like retail.
Customers give Flowroute high scores for product capability:
- Flowroute’s inbound SIP trunking provides unlimited concurrent call capacity. As call volume increases, new trunk instances are dynamically created.
- Flowroute’s outbound SIP trunking/termination focuses on fraud protection and security capabilities like:
- Destination restriction
- Destination whitelisting
- International toll fraud protection
What could be next for Flowroute?
West (now Intrado) acquired Flowroute in August 2018. As reported in our study "
Worldwide Hosted PBX Market 2019-2025," West's customers are medium and large enterprises. West targets businesses with IT departments that can buy more West services, typically companies with more than 300 employees.
We expect Flowroute to expand its customer mix to a more substantial proportion of mid-market and enterprise customers to support and harmonize with West.
Some changes at Flowroute are already evident. Local and toll-free inbound numbers are available in more than 160 countries around the world since summer 2019; this would be beneficial to West’s core customers.
For enterprises that have always used billion-dollar telcos and large communications equipment companies for their SIP trunks, Flowroute, the 2019 Top Rated SIP Trunk Provider, will undoubtedly get a close look – as will West.
