I’m also somewhat skeptical of the pure “rising tide lifts all boats / group hug” camp. On the other side of the fence, there are a lot of players that would rather focus 100% on the competitive side. Some take it as a foregone conclusion that IP communications will win out entirely, eventually, by virtue of being somehow intrinsically better than any non-IP alternative in existence. So why should they waste their resources to get us there – why not let someone else do the heavy lifting? This is the kind of feedback FreedomVOICE and Broadvox has received in the wake of our co-interview.

I think more to the heart of this post is that providers of IP communications need to strike some kind of balance between competition and collaboration. As you mentioned, collaboration and education work to create a larger pool of opportunity by taking from a common enemy (TDM), while engaging in healthy competition increases innovation and aims to ensure your particular business captures a larger share of those spoils.

To take your car analogy, I might instead think of it as two manufacturers of hybrid cars. Each one wants to build and be first to market with the next great hybrid, but they also have a shared vested interest in consumer education as far as why one should value the benefits of a hybrid over the benefits of another type of car. If these hybrid manufacturers only spend their time jabbing at one another, they’re vulnerable not only to a resurgence by traditional non-hybrid cars but also might be unprepared for the future… maybe an affordable, high-functioning fully-electric model.

This is an interesting assertion and I have spent some time thinking about it. In essence, the argument is that hosted IP PBX and SIP trunking providers are not competitors but rather collaborators both endeavoring to grow a marketplace that will displace traditional TDM carriers and telephony providers. That’s a bit like arguing that someone considering purchasing a Lexus or a Ford truck is not looking at the two alternatives as competition, and that the Lexus and Ford salespeople should be actively competing to educate all those that don’t yet drive on the merits of their solutions rather than competing against one another. This is despite the fact that they are very different solutions to the same issue – transportation.

Let’s not dance around this issue. Education regarding the value brought to the table by hosted systems, SIP trunking, IP-enabled PBX systems, and the myriad other solutions is a critical part of marketing efforts for all of us. The better job all of us do in this area, the healthier our industry will be and that is to the benefit of the customers that we have helped to educate. However, let us not be misled in thinking that competition will not be fierce. There will be new product innovations, clever spins on our individual company advantages and disadvantages, and aggressive pricing models. Some of our competitors may even have nasty comments about one another. That’s all part of a healthy competitive environment.

We are competing against the past, the status quo, against one another, and against new forms of competition yet to emerge. Honorable, honest, energetic competition is good for the marketplace. That does not mean we should not also cooperate and share conference panels, authoring documents, or webinars. At the end of the day, I will do everything I can ethically do to capture business for my company. I expect no less from my colleagues in the industry. To say that we are not competitors does not make sense to me.

Fundamentally, at the salesperson level, anyone who is selling into a given budget segment “competes”. If other vendors tap the prospective customer’s budget (while you were educating the Customer) to the point that your solution is excluded for the current fiscal period, you lose.

In my opinion, the biggest challenge facing hosted service providers is that they are currently mostly smaller vendors who do not control the “last mile” between their customers and their PoP which services those customers. This isn’t fatal. What is fatal is that these vendors are failing to provide customers guidance detailing how to address the resulting QoS issues. This isn’t hard for the hosted vendors to do. However, rather than stepping into that void, they “ignore” the issue because they prefer to base their sales arguments on reduced CapEx rather than on the functional benefits and other costs of ownership benefits that can be discussed when addressing hosted vs. on-premise.

@Samuel – I think you nailed it. Those “misunderstanding” customers are extremely valuable to VoIP service providers. I should know – I spent the last 10 years being the IT guy at a large call center that was 100% TDM. Dislodging TDM isn’t easy, but in the long run it will be worth it.

-MC