Vodafone provide hosted services for corporate clients

Head of Vodafone Business Solutions, Derek Appiah

Vodafone Ghana's corporate clients do not have to worry about the high cost and installation of office telecom systems, audio and video conferencing equipment because Vodafone Business Solution has set up a system to host such services on behalf of its clients.

Vodafone Business Solution had previously assisted corporate clients to have all-in-one affordable broadband telephony communication set up in their offices with Vodafone's Web Office device, and later the company assisted the businesses to create easy communication links from their head offices to branches nationwide.

Head of the award-winning Vodafone Business Solution (VBS), Derek Appiah told Adom News Vodafone is now moving on to host communication services for its clients to enable them have access to video and audio conferencing, and office telephone systems without having to make the heavy capital expenditure (capex) in purchasing and installing equipment for that.

This was on the sidelines of the third VBS IT Manager Forum, under the theme “Working Together for Productivity”.

The new collection of hosted services introduced to the IT Managers includes the Vodafone Broadband Telephony for Business, Vodafone Teleconferencing for Business and the Vodafone Hosted Virtual PBX for Business.

The Virtual PBX and Broadband Telephony provides a wide range of benefits, including cost cutting, efficient communication, seamless integration of landline and mobile, as well as emails and text messages in one package and the ability to integrate and or convert analogue systems to IP to ensure interoperability.

The Audio and Video Conferencing system, which was tried at the forum, is touted as one that cuts cost, saves travel time, shorten product development and marketing times among several other benefits.

“What we have for our clients now are complete communication services hosted on our robust network on behalf of our clients, instead of they having to purchase boxes and other equipment to set up those systems by themselves,” Mr. Appiah said.

Mr. Appiah said that meant Vodafone's corporate clients can have access to those very sophisticated services on 'pay-as-you-go' basis, instead of previously, when they had to spend so much money setting up such systems by themselves.

He said the plus for clients is that the services are hosted on the robust broadband-based Vodafone network, which leaves very little room for challenges, which clients could face with reliability if they had set up their own systems.

Vodafone has been accused of focusing its Business Solutions on only large scale enterprises, but Mr. Appiah said the new innovative services are actually targeted at small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) because they are the ones who need affordable innovative services so they can save money.

“These new services make SMEs operate like large-scale and sophisticated companies because they (SMEs) can now afford to do teleconferencing, have integrated telephony systems and do effective communication for less,” he said.

Mr. Appiah said contrary to the notion that VBS is elitist, “we are making significant progress with SMEs and I can tell you that the success of VBS since we launched some 18 months ago hinges on that fact that over 7,000 SME's are on our network and are using our affordable and innovative services.”

He said Vodafone's criteria for determining SMEs is simply companies which have a staff strength of between five and 15, adding that judging by that criteria, Vodafone is serving lots of SMEs in Ghana.

Vodafone have recently been organizing a market storming event called “Happy Feet”, where management leads the office staff of Vodafone to the various market places find out from traders what kind of services they want from Vodafone. That, according to management, has been part of steps to meet the SMEs and even petty traders at their point of their need.

Vodafone is the second largest mobile operator in Ghana with over 4.7million customers as at July 2012.

Story by Ghana/Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/Adom News