John Linton
I started to watch the Sydney Channel 9 program - Business Success while having breakfast this morning. It was just a 30 minute ad for Cisco and and a small consulting company who is co-incidentally located in the same building as Exetel is in North Sydney. I guess Cisco got the promotion because it 'donated' a free $50,000 Cisco IP telephone solution as a viewer prize and the consulting company got the exposure due to their employment of John Eales who has extensive Channel 9 contacts.
As Exetel has just started a more extensive promotion of converged telephone and Data via Ethernet and SHDSL I thought I'd see what was on offer. Apart from the fact that it was just a paid advertisement I suppose the other thing that struck me was that VoIP/Data convergence had 'penetrated' even the relatively challenged intellects of a TV station whose ethos is providing programs for people with an average IQ of 95 and whose ideas of suitable content are soaps and trivialised sensational "news".
Exetel's own use of VoIP and data is very, very extensive and highly cost/effective - but then it should be as we are a communications company with a long association with those technologies. We have over 2,000 business customers but, to date, we have sold very few VoIP products or services to those companies. Those that do use VoIP services from Exetel have achieved very solid cost savings and, more importantly, have started along the path of true telephone/data integration linking their data bases and other internal computer processes in to their network and telephone systems. As a way of focussing more intensely on growing our business customer base we have now started offering no cost VoIP PABX hardware and installation to qualified business users and I'll be interested to see how that works out.
It's a key strategy for Exetel moving forward to make the transition from providing wholesaled services (ADSL and Telephone) to largely residential users to providing complex integrated communications services, and the initial and ongoing consulting that goes with them, to business users over the next 18 months. This is a very, very difficult thing to do but, at least as I see it, if we don't pursue this path then there isn't a very bright future for a company that remains dependent on Telstra Wholesale or indeed any other large communications company. I think that my view is at least partially shared by most other companies with significant ADSL revenues whose futures are looking rogressively less certain as the various future deirections of Telstra and other major communication providers become clearer.
The program has now ended and it was nothing more than an ad for Cisco with some highly mis-leading statements by a variety of people (none from Cisco). Anyway - just another indication of how VoIP is more widely being used.