Jajah enters enterprise with OCS link-up

VoIP specialist Jajah has ramped up its offering for the enterprise market with support for Microsoft's Office Communication System (OCS). This means that enterprises using OCS 2007 Release 2 can connect directl with Jajah's global IP network to make high quality voice calls.

Jajah is a company that previously had limited exposure in the enterprise space, although it had a lot of customers among small businesses and also provided the VoIP software behind Yahoo Messenger.

However, according to Jajah CEO, Trevor Healy the move to the enterprise had been prompted by user demand. “We got a lot of enquiries from enterprises who were looking for VoIP connections. “They asked if we could do for them what we'd done for SMBs. When we investigated further, we found that a lot of these customers had OCS and had a requirement of high-quality, low-price VoIP.

“The combination of Jajah and OCS gives enterprises a powerful and rich external telephony solution,” said Warren Barkley, Microsoft senior director, Unified Communications. “Jajah is a world leader in providing innovative telecommunications solutions to enterprises and consumers worldwide. We believe that they will bring a suite of services that will be interesting and valuable to our customers.”

Healy said that with calls costing about 2 or 3 cents between the US and the UK, cost was undoubtedly a driver for lots of the companies there were other reasons for adopting the system. “There was a need for collaboration within enterprises, we found that a lot of enterprises wanted the ability to embed telephony within an application when that user has a call for action; for example, within email or workflow software.”

He added that there were other factors too. These included security, particularly the ned to move to a common platform and the need to conform to compliance standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley. “Enterprises are nervous about the idea of users making calls outside the phone system, this way every call can leave an audit trail,” Healy said.

He acknowledged that VoIP had had a reputation for being low quality but said that Jajah's offering was highly acceptable. “We're on par high quality on a mobile,” he said. “Quality is a question of price: our standard quality is an average mobile call while we also offer our premium quality. These could be mixed up – you could have your purchasing department on standard and sales on premium for example,” he said.