CHICAGO--The telecom industry needs to stop selling on price in a race to see who is cheaper, and start selling on value, according to the president and CEO of VoIP wholesaler New Global Telecom.

Rich Grange believes there is a much better sales story for business VoIP--one based around total cost of ownership--and he sees the market responding.

“On the consumer side, the race to zero is still on,” Grange said. “On the business side, we see more service providers focused on selling value.”

Convergence gives businesses the ability to avoid operating separate networks, and an ease of management and operations that translates to the bottom line, Grange added. One key element is the self-care portals the VoIP providers are deploying that enable small to mid-sized enterprises to manage their own services and get a greater degree of visibility into the network at the same time.

Most recently, NGT has seen tremendous uptake in a service offering that integrates VoIP into the Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer applications, he said. Instead of a separate user interface, click-to-dial, call forwarding, speed dial and other applications become buttons in the Outlook or IE programs.

Two other key areas of growth are messaging integration and advanced call-control features such as find-me, follow-me and simultaneous ring.

“We will start entering the phase shortly where companies will integrate VoIP into their CRM and ERP applications,” he said. “And we are looking at new things, such as an intuitive speed dial, that ranks numbers based on how often you call them.”

Presence is another major growth area, but Grange sees beyond the basics to a service that incorporates a user’s calendar, as well as their network-use status. “If you are scheduled to be on a conference call and you are using your phone line, the network would know not to put a call through,” he said.