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Microsoft has been releasing more details about their Response Point phone system for small businesses and while its being called a “killer” I’m not so sure.
Microsoft has name recognition, but I’m not certain their reputation will bode well for them in the phone systems business. Phone systems should be nearly bulletproof reliable…Microsoft’s product reputation is far from the mark here. Microsoft’s new product reputation is also poor…usually their products don’t mature until version 3 or 4.
Feature wise, its hard to compare at this point. Their big feature is voice recognition, but one beta tester admits that feature is something their staff “underutilizes.” Can it match the best of its competitor’s features? Who knows at this point.
One concern I have is the hardware. The partner vendors appear to be using modified PCs as the basis of the system. At this time its unclear if the devices are flash or hard drive based…either way phone systems should last for 10 years at minimum and most PC components just aren’t designed that way.
Value is another concern, The Quanta Syspine is estimated to be $2500 for the system and four phones, the D-Link VoiceCenter is estimated to be $2999 for the system and five phones. For comparison a Talkswitch Phone System and five phones is just $1740 - $2765 (depending on growth room and voicemail capacity) and is a mature product from a company making small business telecom products since 1990.
Obviously at this point its hard to say if this is a product to be excited about or ignored until version 4.0.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
December 13th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Response Point is exciting because it brings the spotlight to IP Telephony. While is has a small feature set, it is directly comparable with Talkswitch (CVA) and provides a much better Voicemail and Call Management experience.
December 15th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Of course the Talkswitch CVA is an old model, you may not be comparing modern software. Talkswitch 5.0 has a very strong IP Telephony feature set, nothing I saw about Response Point’s VoIP beat Talkswitch.