800 million plus 332 million

This blog could have been written as Broadvox beats bandwidth.com, but I realized it was an opportunity to point out a good thing. Last week during IT Expo West Sean Rivers, Director of Sales and Product Engineering was quoted saying "The Company handled 332 million minutes over their network last month."  The announcement was made because the IP community has seen tremendous demand and growth for our services this year.

Yesterday, I was on the phone talking to a potential new member of our partner program and he pointed out that they had a loose relationship with one of the largest Internet Service Providers but nothing formal. I was definitely curious. After dropping a few names, I hit home when selecting bandwidth.com again. Admittedly, I will do my best to sign him up as a new member.

As I say repeatedly, how we grow as an industry helps all of us. I am delighted to see their growing success. I was challenged on this by another member of the IP ecosystem who insisted that we are, and will always be, competitors. I allowed him his say but when he was done, I let him know that if we combined all of our resources into a single company, we would still be facing a future threat from either Verizon or AT&T that could swamp us. Yes, we will meet in the marketplace where a prospect is making a buying decision. Yes, we will do our best to position our value proposition and pricing to win the business. However, most of the time we face no competition and are focused on growth and preparing for when the major LECs and CLECs come into this space with earnest.

So, to bandwidth.com's 332 million minutes per month, I say well done. Those minutes are a great addition to our 800 million per minutes per month. Together we are over a billion minutes per month and growing. This is good for the industry. Each success improves the customer base, interoperability, number of references, sales of IP PBXs and so on. Our IP community and ecosystem all benefit.

See you on Monday with a new recipe and more on IP and SIP.