technologyreseller.co.uk 29 TELEPHONY 20% cheaper than the premium handset in the D7 series, even with its more modern design and built-in Wi-Fi; and b) to ensure it has a product to meet customer expectations. In 2025, for example, Snom is planning to introduce a high-end deskphone with a large display and touchscreen. Try’s priorities for 2025, as Snom brings out new products and addresses new markets, will, as ever, be to spread the word about Snom’s capabilities and the opportunities for resellers – and, most importantly, to get devices into people’s hands so they can experience Snom quality for themselves. www.snom.com Vertical strength To these four differentiators, Try adds an expanding product line that includes a variety of phones (deskphones, DECT phones, hospitality phones, conference phones), headsets, location and asset tracking solutions, announcement systems, IP desk phone terminals and accessories that are helping Snom and its resellers to address new markets. “Demand for deskphones is certainly declining in offices where not everyone comes in every day. But Snom is very strong in sectors like healthcare, education, retail and logistics – all places that still need a device, perhaps not always to talk to the outside world but to communicate internally. In some cases, getting a message to a colleague on the shop floor as quickly as possible can be a matter of life or death, and you can’t rely on a mobile phone for that. With DECT technology, you have greater stability and greater security,” he says. “If you’re strong in specific verticals that might not be totally immune to contraction but are always going to need communication devices, you are shielded a little from certain market trends. I think if you were entirely deskphone-oriented, you would struggle. But we have such a strong DECT portfolio that it has more than offset the decline in traditional deskphone sales.” Today, cordless DECT solutions make up about 40% to 50% of Snom’s business. As an example, Try cites a six‑figure contract recently won by one of its partners to roll-out a multi-cell DECT solution across the showrooms of a big UK car dealership. New opportunities Snom’s acquisiton by VTech has opened up other opportunities, notably in the hospitality market. “VTech is very strong in hospitality, but their route to market is different to ours, so we asked to take on their hospitality range and sell that through our distribution channel and resellers,” explains Try. “We launched the first product in that range at the beginning of this year and we’ve recently launched three or four new SIP devices, as well as a range of analogue devices – a new area for us. Half of the devices in hospitality are still analogue because there is so much legacy cabling in hotels and especially in a hotel room the phone is just needed for simple phone calls. We were being excluded from opportunities because in buildings that were part structured cabling and part old wiring, we weren’t able to offer the same device for every room. By having an analogue phone that to the end user looks just like the IP version we can now do that. Orders are coming through regularly for hospitality handsets, and that’s a completely new market for us. It’s been a real success, not just in the UK but across EMEA.” Try adds that while this has generated interest amongst new resellers, much of the business has come from existing resellers that might previously have met the needs of hospitality customers with devices from another vendor. “A lot of resellers already had hotels as customers. It was just a question of making them aware that as well as using Snom phones for offices and front of house, they can now specify Snom for the hotel rooms too. Our distributors have played a big part in getting that marketing message out to patners.” Specialist applications Earlier this year (2024), Snom introduced another new product, the SP 800, with specialist applications in contact centres and home offices where users plug a headset directly into a PC or laptop running a softphone. Developed in response to a request from a reseller in Switzerland, this small box is designed to ensure high quality audio for businesses, in this case a bank, looking to connect employees via remote desktop infrastructure or a soft client through the cloud. “Unusually for us, this is not a device for salespeople to go out and sell. It is something that you put in your proposal just in case the network that the customer says will be fine isn’t fine and they end up having call quality issues,” explains Try. In the meantime, Snom is continuing to develop and expand its core IP phone offering: a) to be more competitive – its recently launched D815 IP deskphone is
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=