MetaSwitch eNews - August 2007

As a subscriber to MetaSwitch eNews, hopefully you already know that MetaSwitch has built up a reputation second to none for delivering great products and backing them up with superb customer support. But did you know that MetaSwitch's commitment to supporting its customers goes well beyond "just" delivering great technology?

MetaSwitch's recently announced MarketVisions program is designed to provide service providers with the tools required to successfully identify market opportunities, position their offerings, and profitably target, sell and support their end-user customers.

"The market for telecommunications services is evolving rapidly as service providers offer a blended set of traditional, IP, mobile and fixed communications options to an increasingly diverse and sophisticated set of end users," said Andrew Randall, vice president of marketing for MetaSwitch. "Our goal is to ensure our customers successfully monetize the move to next-generation communication platforms and services and our MarketVisions program is another tool in their kit."

Through the various functions of Marketing - Market Research, Product Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales and Customer Support - service providers seek answers to a series of important and necessary questions, for which MarketVisions has focused its resources to address.

Much of the initial resources of MarketVisions promote the ability for our customers to successfully market and sell in the potentially lucrative Small and Medium Business (SMB) Market. Concurrent with MetaSwitch's product development focused on developing robust, end-to-end SMB Solutions, MarketVisions offers educational whitepapers, Market Overview brochures, a Product Targeting and Qualification Guide, and customizable Product Brochures for the SMB Solution. These have been made available through a new MarketVisions section of the MetaSwitch Customer Portal resulting in hundreds of document downloads within the first few weeks of the program being launched.

A highlight of the SMB VoIP support is the VoIP Marketing Workshop. Delivered by MetaSwitch with support from Savatar, an industry leading, market research and consulting firm, the full day consultancy is customized to the individual service provider and provides a framework for understanding the market through quantitative, qualitative, and competitive market research. Beyond this, market tested tactics are thoroughly covered through interactive breakout sessions covering topics such as product marketing, end user marketing, sales and channel development. Following the session a series of deliverables tailored to the service provider's specific offering are created. Joey Garner, VP LEC Operations for TEC, exclaimed following a recent Workshop, "We learned so much from the session, and we are very excited to put this knowledge and insight into action marketing to our customers."

Other programs launched as part of the initial phase of MarketVisions include "20/20 Vision", which aids service providers to develop segmentation and geographic analysis to target the right customers with the right offers in the right location, and M3, a brand strategy and messaging development program.

Leveraging the deep database and mapping resources of GeoResults, a well established database vendor for the telecommunications industry, service providers can perform detailed market analysis at an MSA, Central Office, or Zip Code level. Its rich database includes dozens of value-added pieces of information such as employee size, industry type, number of locations, telecom spend, etc. that service providers can utilize to form comparative market analyses for out of region expansion planning or customer profiling studies to help identify likely upsell customer candidates. It may also use its database to form lead lists that deliver the greatest response rates and higher return on their direct marketing investments.

M3 - which stands for Message, Media, and Method - was profiled in the July 2007 edition of eNews). This affordable kick-start program assists service providers to develop a compelling company and product message and brand strategy from which it can conduct Marketing Communications and Public Relations more effectively.

MetaSwitch MarketVisions continues to strive to develop useful and impacting marketing support and more is coming as we continue to invest in, and develop, the program. Watch this space!

METASWITCH eNEWS - AUGUST 2007

MetaSwitch Introduces MarketVisions