SOS Communications has added Cisco's new IP phones to its hosted telephony solution Premier-Cloud.
According to SOS MD Colin Hepher the move brings 'greater differentiation' to his proposition as Cisco bids to claw back market share in the competitive IP phone space.
"Hosted telephony is no longer in its infancy even though penetration has only reached a small percentage of the potential market, yet most resellers are offering very much the same platform base and features," stated Hepher.
"Not so long ago Cisco had over 50% of the market share and intends to regain this space as soon as possible."
Hepher says SOS Communications will play a key role in helping Cisco advance its strategy believing that the infrastructure and methodology that supports Premier-Cloud along with attractive commercials will tip the balance.
"What really counts is resilience," added Hepher. "Most adopt a model where 'identical' servers are located in two separate data centres. One is designated as active and carries all the live traffic. The other is either a hot or warm standby and is normally inactive.
"Failover between the two at network level is relatively straightforward. But there are a number of serious weaknesses to this approach leading to customers suffering long delays, sometimes days, in the event of failover."
Following the Cisco distribution deal Hepher has grasped the megaphone and is amplifying his 'alternative' message to the channel.
"There is another way," he stated. "Our telephony service (phones, portal, SIP trunks and APIs) is supported by two resilient data centres that are fully operational, always carry live traffic and have capacity to scale.
"Our customers are evenly distributed between them and each facility uses the native IP ranges of the data centre provider.
"Since all data centres are active in the event of a data centre failure the only thing that changes is the amount of traffic they carry."
It is not always possible to protect all calls in play during a data centre failover, but Hepher emphasised that IP phones such as Cisco's and resilient SIP trunks can failover significantly faster than BGP.
In what Hepher described as 'another attention grabber', SOS is offering free SIP trunks to channel partners.
Resellers can find out more about SOS's channel propositions during three roadshows next month - 4th July in Manchester, 11th July in Horsham and 18th July in Leeds.