Today we're kicking off a Thanksgiving T-shirt giveaway on Spiceworks, the rapidly growing community of over 2 million IT pros and 1,200+ tech vendors who share product reviews, vendor ratings, how-tos, discussions and more.
Sonoma Wine Shop (and La Bodega) has been an OnSIP customer for about 8 months now. Bryan Cooper, store owner, was kind enough to take the time to interview with us and share his experience with our service so far.
Sonoma Wine Shop is a wine shop located in California. We have two retail locations in Sonoma, CA and Sebastopol, CA.
At Sonoma Wine Shop, we sell wine for small wineries throughout California. We also run La Bodega, a gourmet kitchen where we make fresh pasta, ravioli, & lasagna. We organize a 4,000 member Wine & Dine club as well, with almost 2,000 local dining members; the rest are shipped wines to their homes or offices.
Above image: Obama arrives in New York to assess Sandy's damage. src: Business Insider
Yesterday, President Obama came to New York to witness the mass destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy. It's been a little over two weeks since Hurricane Sandy stormed through the eastern United States, leaving 400,865 homes and businesses without power (Huffington Post). The President visited several homes and businesses that have yet to recover from this unfortunate event. (One of our own employees is still displaced from his home in Battery Park.)
On Wednesday, October 31st, we published a brief blog to let our customers know that our business was up and running and their phone service remained unaffected throughout the week. In a bit more detail now, this is the story of how OnSIP weathered the storm.
Like the majority of hosted providers, we don’t make our own phones. We also don’t get any kickbacks from the sales of any particular brand or manufacturer. Our policy is really simple: bring whatever SIP phone you want, and if you’ve never owned a VoIP phone before, we’ll point you towards the brands that work best with OnSIP.
But as Dave Michels of TalkingPointz points out, there are challenges with that policy.
“[For hosted folks] … the phone itself offers no meaningful part of their value proposition, raises the cost of admission, and complicates deployment.”
All true for us.
We have no control over how great or how awful your phones are. We claim no responsibility for faulty devices just as we can’t take any credit for whatever awesome new Panasonic / Polycom / etc firmware gets released. For now, we only give recommendations, and as far as I know, we’re not getting any more restrictive with our open-door phone policy.
Higher cost of admission? Sure. Although you can technically use our service with free downloadable soft phones, the majority of our new customers are tied to desk phones, which cost anywhere from 70-400+ bucks a pop. For desk phone users, a free trial is really only free if you’re coming with your own devices.
Phones complicating deployment? You could say that. We get a few VoIP savvy people coming to us, but again, the vast majority of our customers aren’t VoIP phone aficionados and we don’t expect them to be. We try our best with our support staff, thorough documentation, and a wide network of partners, but we still get plenty of frustrated customers who view programming a phone like they’re disarming a nuclear submarine with an instruction manual written in Latin.
Jeremy Hughes, Business Development Manager at Network Medics, a full-service IT consulting firm for small and medium-sized businesses, shares his experience with OnSIP's agent program.
We are an IT support company for the SMB Market, based out of Minneapolis. Currently, we have 9 employees at our office.
It started with 3 friends who didn't like what they were doing. A couple of them were in IT and didn't like the companies they were working with or the philosophies of those groups. So they created their own company and have continued to grow ever since.
Image to the right from CNBC
To the many friends of OnSIP who've reached out to see that our company made it through Frankenstorm Sandy: The answer is yes, our employees are accounted for and safe. Our service has been up with little-to-no interruption. And, thankfully due to a UC service we know and love (OnSIP Hosted VoIP), the NYC and NJ office employees who have power have been working from home with their office phones in a browser. Thankfully as well, our PA office was fully operational yesterday, and our remote employees who watched the storm on TV have been available the whole week to help out.
That's not to say it's been easy. Our office headquarters is located in downtown Manhattan across from the New York Stock Exchange. Like the NYSE, the office building has been closed for the past 2 days due to flooding and power outages. We are unsure of whether the office will be operational by the end of the week. Here's a picture taken from our building at 55 Broad St. during the evening of Hurricane Sandy, looking out from the doorway:
Clorece Kulp, a member of OnSIP's support team, shares with OnSIP customers how to keep your business going during Hurricane Sandy.
Rare is the storm that gets it's name three-days prior to forming, but yet here we are. While many of us on the East Coast brace for “Frankenstorm” (the merger of Hurricane Sandy and a northern cold front), OnSIP would like to put your mind at ease regarding your phone service. In the event of a power outage there is no need to panic; your phone system is in the Cloud, which means it will still work unlike your former POTS system.
Back in July, OnSIP was lucky enough to have Eli Etherton, the man behind the well known YouTube Channel "Eli the Computer Guy", pay us a visit to our NYC office. We were thrilled to have him. Our CTO, John Riordan spent the day showing him around our office and explained to him how OnSIP works.
Check out Eli's most recent video, "OnSIP.com and the Future of the Telephone", ( video shown below ) and don't miss out on the other informative videos from his channel.
The world's largest communications and technology event, TMC's ITEXPO West, was held last week in Austin, Texas at the Austin Convention Center. Part of the OnSIP team was fortunate enough to not only attend this event but also participate in it. Our very own CEO, Mike Oeth was part of a panel discussion on " Calculating the True ROI with VoIP in the Cloud."
The panel included:
Today, the world's largest communications and technology event returns to Austin, Texas. TMC's ITEXPO West will be held from October 2nd to October 5th at the Austin Convention Center.
On Thursday, October 4th at 3pm, our CEO Mike Oeth (click here for TMC's interview with Mike) will be partaking in a panel discussion on "Calculating the True ROI with VoIP in the Cloud." This panel discussion is part of the Cloud Communications Expo, a collocated event of ITEXPO. The panel will be made up of -- Aron Aidcard, Senior Director of Product Management at Fonality; Michael Timar, VP Product Management, WVT Communications Group at Alteva & USA Datanet; and Dave Michels, Blogolyst at Talking Points. Below is a brief description of the panel discussion:
“Cloudbased phone solutions are generally an attractive choice for growing businesses because of scalability, flexible cost structure, and enhanced features. Typically, fiscal ROI is immediate, for at the onset of adoption of a VoIP system, small business owners find that they save up to 80 percent compared to traditional, analog phone bills. And though a business can operate immediately with a preloaded VoIP system, integrated addon features are often available to suit niche requirements such as call recording, or voicemail transcription. The true ROI of VoIP phone systems moves beyond just a lower monthly bill – cloudbased VoIP technology provides immediate cost savings, allows employees to work faster and smarter through software integrations, saves business owners with preloaded Fortune 500 features, and provides invaluable insights into the analytics of voice traffic.”
