By Tim Young

Recently I, like many Americans, took in the Super Bowl. It was an exciting game featuring a decisive comeback by a strong team from a city that’s had its share of rough times in recent years. (If you don’t follow American football, or if you’ve sworn off the Super Bowl until your team makes it, I’m talking about the New Orleans Saints, here.) That’s usually, however, not the case at all. The game is often an afterthought played between poorly matched teams resulting in an uneventful occasion for anyone whose bedsheets aren’t festooned with the logo of the victorious team.

So why do so many Americans sit down to watch the Super Bowl? It’s tradition. There are chicken wings. It’s an excuse to drink too many beers on a Sunday afternoon. And, of course, there are the commercials, which lead me to my central point. Out of all of the commercials I took in last night- funny or poignant, clever or lame—I saw quite a few commercials for personal communications, but not a single ad for business communications.

I hear a huge rush of offers for home-based triple play everywhere I turn. Where’s the push for business services? It’s there, of course. It’s targeted and calculated, and those who market business services understand that they’ll gain more leverage through direct contact than through widespread brand-awareness campaigns. Still, the idea that so lucrative a market isn’t being more broadly marketed to is indicative of the general complacency that we’ve seen in the relationship between many service providers and their business accounts. We hear, at length, about the sexy technologies that CSPs are pushing to capture the 18-24-year-old market, but less about how CSPs are helping to keep enterprise and SMB customers at the forefront of their minds.

Meanwhile, the estimated value of the telecommunications business services market is a whopping $130 Billion USD in the United States alone. The average revenue per subscriber-line for a business voice system is considerably higher than a comparable consumer line (Stratecast stated that a business line was worth twice as much as a consumer line in an admittedly dated 2007 study). At the same time, traditional revenue streams are contracting, as many users

And the demands of the business customer are high. Voice and data quality must be of utmost importance, as what may be a minor annoyance for a residential customer could cost a business customer money.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t solid options for business customers. There are fascinating tools available to enterprises that are willing to pay for them. Major US telcos AT&T and Verizon have a long history of working with business clients, and provide a wide range of tools for the smallest to the largest business customers. AT&T’s InSite provides business users with a brilliant access portal that provides information about the customer’s account, usage, and other valuable metrics that are of particular help to the small business that lacks the dedicated manpower to constantly monitor all aspects of use and billing.

Verizon Business, likewise, understands the needs of the enterprise and SMB customer and can react accordingly. This includes an awareness of the importance of e-commerce for many modern businesses of every size. “The use of the internet has allowed customers to transcend pre-sales and move