Grandstream Networks Seeks Growth in SMB VoIP
The SMB VoIP market shows no sign of slowing down and so many companies are vying to get a piece of this market which is projected to grow for many years to come. One player in this area is Grandstream Networks, specializing in delivering easy to use products for SMBs and service providers.
The company says 50% of its revenue comes from selling devices into the business sector and based on the growth of this market they expect this percentage to grow.
Grandstream Chairman & CEO David Li tells me in a recent face-to-face meeting that his company’s products are affordable, have an uncompromised feature set, high quality and interoperate with many major players such as Sylantro, 3COM, Lucent & Avaya. Finally, Li says his company provides excellent support.
I asked where Li sees the company in the next five years and he told me they want to be a major player in voice and video devices for consumers and businesses.
When asked about competition, common names such as Polycom, Linksys and the more specialized Snom came up.
One interesting part of our discussion was regarding a recent customer which is a political candidate. Currently there is a thousand or so phones being used by this politician and it could scale to over ten thousand. Li could not disclose who the candidate was but Grandstream’s home state is Massachusetts so you can take a guess for yourself.
What makes this an interesting deployment is the phones are XML-enabled and data is pushed to phones and agents can also enter data into the telephony devices. In this case XML allows these devices to function as IM terminals.
The company’s GXP line of phones competes favorably with the major players with a lower price point and Li tells me we will see two new phones in this line released at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo this September in Los Angeles, CA. Both devices will support XML, PoE, multiple lines and have a full suite of features.
The company sells primarily through resellers unless of course you are a very large company or presidential candidate. If you are a reseller or small to medium business – or even an ITSP, drop by the company’s site for details or just be at ITEXPO in LA next month to see what’s new.
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Grandstream releases defective products to Public while not notifying their resellers or drop shippers that they are still in Beta. I spoke with the Vice President Bruce MacAloney regarding this issue and has stated that VOIPSUPPY.com is the one to be contact regarding this issue as Grandstream doesn't support End Users. Simple terms they create products and don't support them while releasing non-debugged firmware updates. I contacted VOIPSUPPLY. They stated that they do not support Grandstreams products. Can you blame them.. I wouldn't. And also they were not informed of grandstream products being in BETA stage. So products where release to public for purchase to reduce Grandstreams Payroll. Sorry to post this but I felt the need to release this valuable information to OPEN PUBLIC as I will proceed to legal actions.