Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) specialist intY has become the first company to offer Microsoft Lync as a hosted telephony solution to the channel as multi-tenant white label service.
The solution offers integrated voice, data and collaboration, billed on a per user, per month basis as part of its Cascade provisioning platform. Telcos and larger ISPs are the first target for intY, but the firm is yet to announce which firms have signed up.
Skype
intY unfortunately chose to launch the day after Microsoft purchased Skype. However, managing director Chris Baldock feels that the announcement, “…will not affect us; it’s a logical move for Microsoft and completes their story.”
Mark Herbert, business development director and founder of intY adds “…this is the year of unified communications for Microsoft and putting Lync onto Skype is a marriage made in heaven. With Office 365 out [soon], it is logically that we will see Skype as the PSTN breakout for Office 365”
intY expects that partners will sell complete Lync based telephony from around £25 per user a month with partners likely to make a healthy 20 to 30 percent margin at these price points. However, with “non-Lync” solutions in the UK market starting as low £10 per user, does the firm believe its solution has enough differentiation? Herbert feels that clients will need to be educated on the value: “When you look at the way Lync integrates with the desktop suite, such as presence and real-time messaging and with clients for mobile devices, it brings you out of the domain of things like Asterix,” he comments.
intY will work with Sipcom to offer the standard SIP backhaul for its service. However, the firm has committed to working with other providers to substitute the SIP backhaul for partners with existing carrier agreements.
Differentiator
Although some of the larger intY channel partners have the capacity to potentially roll out a hosted Microsoft Lync solutions themselves, Herbert feels that as many already use the firms other products like BPOS, Sharepoint and email, intY can allow them to quickly add UC with minimal disruption. The firm will also handle technical areas like number porting, monthly billing and licensing agreements on behalf of partners.
Baldock is keen to point out that the Cascade Integrated Management Platform that’s used by its channel is its key differentiator. The architecture, which is white labelled by firms like Daisy, Kcom and Cable and Wireless, allows new connectors for cloud and hosted applications to be quickly created and provisioned.
