Long day today.

 

Fitting end (almost) to a busy week, replete with travel.

 

Monday was Boston and the Channel Partners Conference.

 

Tuesday was Manhattan and SpeechTek.

 

Wednesday was an opportunity to catch up back in the office in Norwalk, CT.

 

And today was a travel/meeting/dinner day in Huntsville, Alabama.

 

...via Nashville.

 

Let's see if my memory is up to the task this evening...

 

On Monday we met with Michael Storella, Director of U.S. Business Development for IP phone maker snom. Among the things we discussed were the company's new initiatives, including an OCS related solution, which according to Storella should help snom open up some opportunities in the large enterprise market. As he said, the initiative "...opens up conversations with Fortune 500-types, where we generally hadn't had these contacts before. They're trying us out." Storella maintains a positive outlook regarding this particular opportunity.

 

That same evening we sat down for a chat with Steven Kokinos, CEO of Thinking Phone Networks.

 

Thinking Phone is a provider of hosted PBX services, and they are huge believers in the open systems approach. As Kokinos explained, open systems provide benefits to businesses, and (leveraging those systems) Thinking Phone is able to provide rich business intelligence and management reporting tools (dashboards) to their customers.

 

Thinking Phone believes reporting is one of the key differentiators that places their solution above the competition. Their solution provides reports addressing the underlying things management wants to see -- sales and support -- and offers the ability to quantify the amount of effort being expended and how effective those interactions are.

 

In fact, Kokinos believes that his company is among only a few hosted providers that can fulfill the requirement of offering businesses high levels of visibility into their operations.

 

Visibility into business is a core element that people are looking to do a better job at; and things like activity logging, tracking, etc..., are a key focus for Thinking Phone.

 

Tomorrow, I'll catch you up on what I saw and who I spoke with at SpeechTek, as well as give you some insight into what I was doing in Huntsville.