Now that you've seen Response Point, what do you think?

http://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/

Response Point was Bill Gates' last pet project before he retired.  The big differentiater between Response Point and other VOIP solutions for small businesses is the voice control offered by Response Point.  Users can "talk" to the phone instead of dialing numbers, you can copy your Outlook contacts to your phone, and you can control the behavior of incoming calls.  Response Point can also let you define how your voice mail gets delivered to you.  You can have your voice mail stored in the Response Point system like a traditional phone, or you can have it email the voice message directly to your Inbox, so you can listen to the voice mail anywhere you can access your email. 

SP1 added SIP trunking to Response Point, and NGT is one of our partners that offer this functionality.

SIP trunking allows VOIP not only within your network, but over the Internet as well.  NGT provides quality of service management so that even though your voice calls are traveling over the Internet, NGT's device will ensure that your voice quality remains consistent.  NGT also allows you to add additional features to your overall VOIP solution than Response Point alone can offer by itself.  Check out NGT at their URL below.

http://www.ngt.com/responsepoint/

During each of our events this semester, we're also handing out information cards on the NGT offerings.  If you fill out the cards and return them after the event, your cards will be added to a drawing for a $75.00 gas card.  NGT will also be happy to follow up with you to answer any of your questions.

If you have any Response Point questions, give me a yell.

Until next time!

Rob

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Published Saturday, September 27, 2008 8:33 PM by rwagg
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Comments

# re: Now that you've seen Response Point, what do you think?

As a small business systems integrator, I have also sold/installed/serviced phone systems for many years.

I now sell VoIP solutions, using various products.

I see the beauty of VoIP/SIP is its universality. I can choose among multiple ITSP (trunk) vendors and PBX (phone system) and SIP phone suppliers to get the solutions I want at the right price. It's open system.

Response Point is (at the moment) is a closed system. Currently I buy ITSP trunks and resell them at a markup of my choosing. For RP, my clients get the rate and I get the commission the few ITSP vendors decide for me.

I can choose among lots of VoIP PBX devices. I can even choose between two or more software-only apps that run under Windows. But I have only four or five choices with RP; that implies higher price.

I can't even choose the phones I want to use--they have to be RP 'custom' (make that more expensive). And they don't even use true SIP (or standard CODECs).

There's not even a supported soft phone!

Bill says the real 'differentiator' is voice recognition. That's a neat feature, but to SMB it's the frosting on the cake. The 'cake' in this case is integration with MS products--Exchange. And that doesn't yet exist. Many existing VoIP phone systems can send SMTP voicemail or status messages.

Either RP is premature in this market, or MS is trying to lock up a proprietary segment of a market whose virtue is diversity.  Dave

Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:39 PM by Dave Day

# re: Now that you've seen Response Point, what do you think?

Dave,

Thanks for your thoughts on this.  I can understand your concern, but we are adding new SIP trunk providers as we “speak”.  As far as a "closed" system.  We only support a limited number of handsets since we do require that the handsets offer the "Blue Response Button", but we are open to working with any OEMs that would like to use our software platform.  The Blue Button, is part of our differentiator, and we do require its presence on every Response Point (RP) certified device.  This button is part of what provides our differentiated value.

As far as your 'cake' analogy, Response Point can send SMTP voicemail to any email server, not just Exchange.  It's a configuration setting that your customer, or you, can define on a PER USER basis.  You can configure RP so that most people receive their VMs in the traditional way where they dial the VM number and access their VMs via phone.  OR you can configure RP to email the VMs to your users via the SMTP email server and DELETE THEM from the RP unit so they do not reside in two places.  OR you can choose to email the VMs to the users AND store the VMs on the RP device.

We've tried very hard to offer flexibility in this area on a per user basis.  If you need assistance in configuring this for your users, please let me know and I’ll be happy to provide the detail on configuring this feature.

Our intent is to not create a proprietary solution, we’ve opened our specifications to anyone that wants to develop against them, but our specifications do require minimum requirements to ensure that the user has a consistent, and excellent, experience.  Our goal is to avoid sub-par hardware so that we can avoid some of the frustrations in the SIP arena that have plagued us in the PC arena.  

Your last point was cost.  Our offering does provide consistent pricing, our intent is that our partners will generate revenue on the RP devices through their services offered.  There are plenty of customization extensions our partners can provide to our customers.  Our goal is to provide an offering on a consistent and extensible platform.  RP runs on Windows, so any Windows developer can easily extend their skill set to developing for RP.  Our intent is to help lower the VOIP entry costs for our small business customers.  The Syspine RP device is offered at Costco, and the pricing is very aggressive (~$1799).  Here is the current URL to the response Point device offered at Costco:

www.costco.com/.../Productgroup.aspx

I do not see that our offering will raise customer costs, we expect that offering additional choice for our customers will help drive down their costs.

This is our first entry into the small business VOIP offering and we continue to enhance the platform based on our users’ and OEMs feedback.  

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and please let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time!

Rob

Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:46 AM by rwagg

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