There are a number of VoIP phone models and manufacturers, and choosing the right ones can make or break hosted VoIP phone service providers. sipVine, a nationwide provider of hosted phone service, chooses to promote Cisco and Polycom models for its VoIP phone line-up for a variety of reasons. 
Best of Breed – Certainly, there’s an element of name recognition in these phones that provides credibility to a privately held provider such as sipVine. Selecting Cisco and Polycom, both best of breed manufacturers, provides obvious advantages to companies in this segment. Quality manufacturing, product warrantees, and overall reliability are extremely important, and the benefits are felt by end user customers.
Ease of Use – When end user customers are transitioning to new technology, delivering phones that allow for the vast VoIP feature set to be intuitive and easy to use is paramount to the success of a hosted phone service provider. sipVine has found that both of these manufacturers have crafted their phones to be easy to use and adapt to a variety of VoIP software platforms.
Flexibility in Programming – End user customers are not interested in how easy a phone is to configure with the software, but they do benefit in the outcomes of flexible, adaptable phones. As an example, sipVine is able to keep the phone system affordable to the end user by virtue of the ability to devise configuration scripts which can mass configure large numbers of phones. Setting up small and large businesses is quick and easy, which keeps installation charges low. Additionally, sipVine has been able to add several features and custom design the customer configuration in large part due to the phone line-up selected.
Phone Line Up is Not Proprietary – With the Polycom phones and the Cisco Small Business series, the phones are not proprietary to a manufacturer base system. This allows hosted companies to adapt the phones to its particular VoIP software. It also fits well with providers such as sipVine, which does not hold their customers to term contracts. sipVine recognizes that companies are making decisions both on the technology and the provider and wants to allow customers the flexibility to move their phones to another hosted provider if sipVine doesn’t meet all expectations. Fortunately, this flexibility has produced very infrequent movement away, but is a compelling message nonetheless.
Additional Benefits Specific to Cisco – Simply put, sipVine and end user customers love
these phones. They are very easy to use and provide a number of custom approaches in deployment. The screens and menu options are very easy to understand and follow, and the line appearance buttons allow for a variety of use, such as speed dials with user presence indicators, park placement and retrieval, and direct dial and main line delivery.
Additional Benefits Specific to Polycom – Hands down, Polycom speaker phone technology
is the best in the business. For end users who utilize the speaker phone feature routinely, they cannot go wrong with a Polycom phone. Certainly, most people are very familiar with the conference room phones offered by Polycom. Because of the quality of the speaker on the desk phones, many customers deploy a desk phone in smaller conference rooms to save on the expense of the more traditional conference room phone. Polycom phones are also easy to use and, if it matters, they are just darned good looking as well!
A quality line up of VoIP phones is an important criterion for hosted phone service provider selection. You cannot go wrong with Cisco and Polycom phones in a provider’s line up!
About the author: Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments.
