Ifbyphone has announced that it will began offering carriers the chance to provide advanced, “cloud” telephony applications to their customers at a level of investment that removes previous barriers to entry. 

 

"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 (News - Alert) CEO Irv Shapiro. 

 

Carriers, CLECs, ILECs, hosted PBX companies, and cable multi-system operators (MSOs) with softswitches 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, company officials said.

 

The ability to have these various telephony services offered by Ifbyphone is beneficial for small-to-mid-sized businesses because of its innovative management capabilities that allow employees and upper management alike to be more productive and organized.

 

Officials say that the launch of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking allows carriers to connect to Ifbyphone and route certain calls to “smart ports” on its platform, yet keep origination and termination. 

 

“Ifbyphone is changing the game. Carriers make a far lower investment commitment, get access to industry-leading features, add capacity with us as they grow, and keep their customers very happy by continuing to serve them directly. For CLECs that want to compete on services and features, this will radically change the competitive dynamics,” said Shapiro.

 

An example of how this platform could work is if a small business customer of a CLEC might want an IVR for their business, they would sign up for that service through their CLEC and configure the IVR using Ifbyphone’s white-labeled web-based GUI.  An inbound call to that small business will get routed to Ifbyphone for IVR call handling, then for 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.

 

The benefits to carriers of using Ifbyphone’s white-labeled services include:

 

 

In addition, carriers retain the service delivery components that are important to them, including:

 

 

“We started by selling direct to 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,” Shapiro concluded.