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primary advertising vehicle, especially for regional and retail oriented businesses. To play in the business arena, a carrier must be able to maintain consistency in the customers’ listings. Directories are only printed once or twice per year, meaning that an error in a listing or yellow page ad has a long lasting and extremely negative impact. Automating the accurate transfer of information to the directory provider is another critical requirement for any automated solution.

Getting Technical with SIP and New CPE

Moving beyond the order capture and related operations processes, new technology-related concerns come to the fore for business VoIP

For example, the hunt group is a feature that doesn’t exist in the residential world, but is table stakes in the business arena.

management solution should provide for mass configuration of SIP devices based on pre-defined profiles. The solution should also provide, however, for online capabilities where an administrative end-user can manage SIP features and reconfigure devices in real time.

Beyond SIP handsets, other new customer premises devices are necessary to enable business-grade VoIP. The typical residential analog telephone adapter that is used for

offerings. For example, the hunt group is a feature that doesn’t exist in the residential world, but is table stakes in the business arena. This feature allows a company to establish a ringing order so that, for example, if a receptionist is away from the front desk, important inbound calls will not be missed when other employees can just as easily take the call. Many businesses like to reconfigure their hunt groups regularly for various reasons, such as a certain employee going on vacation or leaving the company. If a carrier plans to support hunt group configuration with manual processes, it will result in many expensive calls to the contact center and slow response times that make for an inelegant customer experience. This in turn drives unnecessary costs and churn, both of which obviously are counter to the revenue goals that drive new commercial VoIP offerings in the first place. Therefore, the relevant administrative tools, driven through easy to use interfaces, must be available for hunt group configuration.

VoIP service only provides two ports. Some operators have resorted to taping or gluing multiple ATAs together to provide multi-line services. This is a sloppy approach that introduces multiple points of failure, uses unnecessary power, and doesn’t provide the kind of device monitoring and alarming capability a real business-grade service requires. Business VoIP providers need to support multiple new types of serving devices that are appropriate to the various sizes and types of business customers they choose to target. These devices need to be configured in an automated way so that it’s not necessary to use well paid engineers to do what amounts to technical-clerical work with every implementation.

Without process-driven solutions that can help to automate most of these functions, ensure accuracy throughout the customer transition, and drive flawless service continuity thereafter, commercial VoIP offerings will struggle to remain competitive and to offer business-grade service. A service management OSS solution that is designed to support commercial VoIP offerings, and which can scale to support greater volume as well as new services and features, can play a necessary role in providing a foundation for long term growth in competitive but lucrative business markets.