Ahead of Swoop Datacom’s upcoming launch of version 2 of their platform, I spoke to John Bennett, CEO of Swoop Datacom, to see what’s coming in their latest release.
Swoop Datacom v2
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John Bennett[/caption]
“The key thing we’re doing is expanding our portfolio. When we first started, we came from a telephony background, were involved with Snom for the first IP Phone, made the first IP-PBX and realised there was a huge gap in the market for provisioning multi-vendor endpoints and subsequently developed the first ‘born in the cloud’, multi-vendor provisioning and management SaaS. We’ve delivered a commercial channel based model and been very successful. Now, we have access to 65% of the global market in terms of distribution of IP based end points across our multi-vendor estate”.
“We’re looking to migrate over 15 million legacy endpoints across 5 or 6 vendors as they continue their journey to the cloud. We’re working closely with Cisco, Polycom, Mitel and Avaya and are launching campaigns to empower them. With version 2, you’ll see these vendors exclusive features added to the platform at a granular level that have never been implemented in the cloud before. You’ll not only be able to provision to the major call control platforms. So, we’re talking about BroadSoft, MiCloud, IP Office Cloud, 8x8, RingCentral and many more but also real time manage device from the cloud.
One of the things we’ve found on this journey over the last 3 years is that companies don’t just want provisioning of their SIP phones. They want to monitor their devices and have access to analytics and in-life management. The uptake has been brilliant. Primary, enterprise customers have been toying with it, but we are now bringing it down to small businesses and mid-market. One example, they’ll be able to schedule firmware updates at a specific time for a group or location of deployed in-life devices and actually manage their own estate from the cloud.
The biggest element of version 2 is managing other devices like session border controllers, routers and switches. Anything we can get our hands on and send information too will be our key play over the next year.
“By the time we get to Q1 next year, we should have 5 or 6 more vendors on board and tens of new third party devices supported"
"We’re bringing the kind of features that you associate with huge enterprises to the lower end of the market and making it affordable. When I was involved in launching SIP devices and services in its infancy the vision was affordable and flexible solutions, this is still our focus to this day some 17 years later”.
Passion for provisioning
All the above is direct from John as he explained what was coming in version 2. I stopped him briefly to jump in and say how refreshing it was to hear his passion for provisioning, given my background running provisioning teams. I told him that I knew first hand the types of challenges that are faced on a day to day basis – and wished Swoop Datacom was around when I was trying to find new staff to manually configure phones without any experience.
“We didn’t do this to make a quick buck. The idea was longevity and to grow over many years. We’re still in our infancy and still developing but we’ve been quickly adopted by 15 distribution partners serving around 80 countries in our first two years after launching v1.0. We’ve had huge uptake which tells us we’re doing the right thing and 9 versions later we’re leading the market, supporting the largest telephony manufacturers and distributors in the world.
It’s not been difficult to develop this technology now SIP is established and it’s been enjoyable on the way. Honestly, my team were bored making IP phones, there’s only so much you can do with the hardware."
