Disruptive Telephony

Kudos to David Cork and his team over at Natural Convergence Inc(NCI) for their announcement of $10 million USD in funding. Given that they are a sister company[1], I've met a good number of their folks over the years and have been quite impressed with both their staff and their technology.[2]

Their approach to the SMB space is a very interesting one in that the application they provide allows service providers to have an offering that allows small businesses to replace their aging key systems with new VoIP systems... without having to take on the administration of an IP PBX. The SMB gets the advantages of VoIP, such as new apps or being able to have an extension basically anywhere in the world that there is an IP address (from the simple case of the owners' homes to cases like remote office or workers), without having to invest in any on-premise equipment or having to manage the software. So a service provider that wants to roll out a VoIP offering to small businesses can just buy the NCI solution and start rolling it out.

Congrats to the whole team on landing the funding - I look forward to seeing how they will grow! [3]

P.S. Tip of the hat to Jon Arnold for blogging about this. In getting caught up on post-holiday reading, I learned of the funding there.

---

[1] Full disclosure: NCI is, like my employer Mitel, a member of the Wesley Clover group of companies and Mitel partners with NCI in some areas.

[2] They also had (and may still have) a very cool office in an old movie theater building in Ottawa and kept one of the movie theatres intact for demos and presentations. (Nope... they moved to a different office some time ago.)

[3] And I'll save a debate on the merits of "on-premise" versus "hosted" VoIP for another day... suffice it to see I see value in both and recognize that different customers require different solutions.