Voip strategic mareket positiong through corporate matrimony

As the Voice over IP market heats up and players jostle for identy and market positions, there seem to be a trend toward cooperation and partnership between the major players rather than unwholesome competition. Some of the more noticeable ones are the marriage between Skype and Boingo, and the alliance between Vonage and Motorola. Also of note worthy is the partnership between Vonage Marketing and TowerStream.

In a strategic move to consolidate her dominance in the free voip sector and to make and inroad into the paying wifi premium service, Skype entered into an allinace that gave her subscribers instant access in the Skype zones to Boingo's 18, 000 WiFi hotspots around the world.

In the same vein, Vonage sought to enhance her market position by going into a collaboration with Motorola, that gave her distribution rights to Motorola's VT2442 voip gateway, a device that features four Ethernet ports for connecting other devices, a full fledged network router, and a state-of-the-art firewall that fortifies Internet security using TI’s TNETV1060 advanced voip gateway chipset. This will position Vonage's service as one of the safests in an industry where security is a major concern.

In another strategic move targeting businesses, Vonage and TowerStream have partnered, to provide wireless services that cut out the traditional carriers for both voice and data to businesses.

As rightly observed by Mark Blowers, senior analyst at Butler Group, there is a good chance that we will see many more of these partnerships as the voip market stabilizes and matures. In his words, “We are going to see more of this. Skype is very innovative and it is logical that they would extend services beyond the desktop like this.“I think we will see others do this soon too. It is clearly a growing threat to mobile and fixed line carriers.”
Austin Akalanze