Ifbyphone offers 'cloud' telephony apps

CHICAGO, US: Ifbyphone has begun offering carriers the opportunity to provide advanced, "cloud" telephony applications to their customers at a level of investment that removes previous barriers to entry.

All carriers, CLECs, ILECs, hosted PBX companies, and cable multi-system operators (MSOs) with softswitches in their architecture can now connect to Ifbyphone and expand their service offerings to include features like full-function IVR, Call Queuing, Call Tracking and "Find Me" Call Forwarding, and complete applications such as Voice Broadcasting, Store Locator, and Lead Distributor.

The key to this new sales model is Ifbyphone's launch of session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking, which allows carriers to connect to Ifbyphone and route certain calls to "smart ports" on the Ifbyphone platform, yet retain origination and termination.

While in theory, a carrier could establish a trunk to Ifbyphone via PSTN to get access to Ifbyphone services, the setup and configuration would be prohibitive and costly:SIP helps make the routing logic at the switch (or in this case, softswitch) far simpler.

"Carriers who want to offer advanced services have previously faced a real investment dilemma: either make a six-figure investment gamble on hardware and software and hope that customers pay for the new features, or don't, and hope you don't lose customers to competitors," said Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro.

The white label offering enabled through SIP connectivity represents a logical evolution of Ifbyphone's sales channel strategy. "We started by selling direct to small and medium businesses (SMBs), then broadened our sales model to serve SMBs through an active reseller program," said Shapiro. "Now, by offering our services on a white-label basis to carriers, we have the ability to offer our easy-to-configure tools to millions of SMB customers through the carriers who service them."

To illustrate the new model, a small business customer of a CLEC might want an IVR for their business. They sign up for that service through their CLEC and configure the IVR using Ifbyphone's white-labeled web-based GUI. Then an inbound call to that small business will get routed to Ifbyphone for IVR call handling. In this example, the caller might say "agent" to reach a customer service representative, with Ifbyphone applying routing logic to the call, then passing it back to the carrier for termination.