It has been about 15 months since we first started offering Microsoft Response Point phone systems so I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on Response Point’s strengths, weaknesses and positioning in the small business phone system market. I’ll start with a brief history of Response Point:
Intro to RP
Response Point was designed with the purpose of creating a small business phone system that was:
1- Affordable
2- Functional
3- Easy to install
4- Easy to manage
5- Easy to grow
Response Point 1.0 based products were released in November 2007 by Syspine and a bit later by D-Link. I must say they nailed most of these objectives. One shortcoming of course in version 1.0 was the lack of SIP trunk support. Response Point 1.0 was a VoIP phone system that did not support VoIP trunks.
This shortcoming as well as a few other needed features were addressed with Service Pack 1 which was released after about 7 months of RP’s launch. Coinciding with SP1 was the introduction of Aastra as a Response Point product supplier. This followed with a series of annoucements of Response Point certified ITSPs offering VoIP services for RP as well as new RP-certfied hardware vendors ClearOne and Quintum.
In Q1 of 2009, Microsoft launched Service Pack 2 for Response Point with yet more feature/functionality available to the growing community of RP users and partners. Microsoft continues to develop RP and offers free upgrades to existing users.
Why Response Point?
Microsoft Response Point offers something that most other phone system product fall short of. That is the ability for business owners (or non-telecom IT personnel) to set-up their own phone system with minimal technical knowledge or effort required. This empowerment offers small businesses the following benefits:
1- Very affordable to acquire and deploy the phone system
2- System installation within minutes to avoid downtime to the business
3- Control to manage users, call handling, moves, changes with a few mouse clicks.
4- Large corporate image from a small business system
5- Productivity gains through PC – Phone integration
6- Tremendous cost of ownership savings in terms of management, maintenance and calling costs
Why not Response Point?
Response Point is not for everyone. With simplicity and ease of use also come some limitations:
1- Response Point only scales up to 50 users which is fine for small businesses but can be limiting to many small to mid-sized companies.
2- Response was not designed for a feature card battle (like many traditional vendors have done for years). While the number of features may be much less than other products, most commonly-used features are in RP as well as some very attractive bells and whistles such as Speech Recognition.
3- Remote extension and remote branch in RP is not as simple as it should be and thus not at all user friendly for most small businesses. Microsoft recognizes this and will likely address this in a future release.
4- RP only works with RP-certified hardware. While there is a variety of RP-certified hardware options available now, RP could benefit from having more variety in hardware, phones and accessory products to choose from. Having the ability to integrate with industry standard SIP based products would be a great bonus.
While there are many small business phone systems available on the market that offer more features and functionality, better scalability, more mobility and open standards, none really compare to the simplicity and ease of management offered by Microsoft Response Point. I believe this is what helps make RP “easy to sell” as well!
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