Telecom is targeting small-to-medium businesses with a new website that offers hosted phone, email, PC support and website services.

The move mirrors similar portals recently launched by British Telecom (former home of new Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds) and Telstra in Australia.

But several services are conspicuously absent from the Telecom Business Hub (www.telecombusinesshub.co.nz).

The hub will target customers above the range of Telecom Broadband (formerly known as Xtra) but too small for its IT services division, Gen-i, which generally aims at companies with 50 to 100 or more users.

So far, small businesses have proved an elusive group. Telecom head of business marketing Victoria Crone confesses that one project to sell services online, through a partner, yielded a solitary sale. She says the hub, by contrast, scored dozens of customers during its first 24 hours online, and has potential to attract tens of thousands.

Lacking from the initial hub line up are VoIP, online backup or unified communications, which lets a customer access all their voice, instant message, fax and email messages in a single inbox, accessible from any PC or cellphone. Crone says all are due to join the mix-and-match menu of products offered through the Hub website later in the year. Tools for small business to get themselves noticed on the web – including search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are also in the coming-soon basket.

Telecom will also add a raft of software-as-a-service (SaaS) features beyond unified comms, covering areas like accounting, project management and HR. The SaaS model, pioneered in New Zealand by accounting software start-up Xero, sees software, and the files created by it, stored on the internet and accessible from any PC, rather than software being installed on and tied to one computer.

Telecom has launched into the SaaS market previously. In 1999, it partnered Microsoft and EDS on a joint venture called eSolutions. But there were few takers for the technology now known as SaaS, and eSolutions was quietly folded after the dot.com crash.

Rosalie Nelsen, a telecommunications research manager with IDC, says unified communications is also a case of back-to-the-future, too. During the 1990s and early 2000s it was known as unified messaging, but never took off. 
What’s different now?

The key difference is that around 97 per cent of small businesses have broadband, says Crone, compared to 20- 30 per cent during the eSolutions era (fast internet is essential for delivering software over the internet).
IDC’s Nelson says Telecom is doing the right thing by rolling out the hub with basic services only, as a lot of education is needed to convince small businesses they need SaaS. She says there is “real potential” for simple hosted services like payroll. Anything more convulated could spook small businesses. And she notes small means small in New Zealand; Department of Statistics figures say 89 per cent of firms have five or fewer employees. Most lack a resident IT expert, let alone a dedicated tech support person, says Nelson. Telecom has catered to this tech-challenged crowd by using 100 small business people as guinea pigs to test the Hub, says Crone.

With its launch this week, the Hub concentrates on more meat-and-potatoes services such as Business Mail (from $9.95 a month per user), web hosting (from $9.95 to $89.95 a month per website), remote technical support (from $20 per PC) and website design (free through a range of DIY templates; or $1000 per site; or $500 per shopping cart for e-commerce sites, if Telecom does the design for you). A new service called Smart Call debuts that lets a small business person make calls over either a landline or mobile, with messages to either phone being routed to a single inbox.

The hub also offers three broadband DSL plans for small businesses, ranging from $53 a month with a 3 gigabyte (GB) cap to $98 with a 30GB cap. All come with a DSL gateway from 2Wire that connects up to four PCs and two phones (but not VoIP phones) to a broadband connection.

Hub DSL customers will get help desk support priority, a static IP address (meaning a company can host a website) and a guarantee their connection speed won’t be throttled back if a customer busts their data cap (though they will incur charges of $2.67 to $4.45 a GB). Customer propositions manager business Lynne Le Gros says Telecom has not hired any additional help desk support.

Consumer on Telecom Broadband accounts will not suffer longer hold times as hub customers are prioritised, she says, due to the introduction of more efficient call centre software, and more DIY help options on Telecom’s website.

All the non-phone or DSL services are offered through partners. For example, Business Mail uses Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, and is hosted by Microsoft; Sentient will fulfill web design contracts, and Technicare will handle the remote tech support component (known as “managed services” and a hot area in the global IT industry).

Crone says while a small business could access any of these services directly from Microsoft, Sentient, Technicare or other partners, the hub portal provides a convenient one stop shop; saves time-starved small business people trying to establish which companies are credible; and lets them pay for everything on one bill.

While she won’t be drawn on any customer acquisition targets for the hub, Crone notes that today only 50% of small to medium businesses have websites, and that the owners of a quarter of those say they’re cobweb sites in need of refurbishment.