Hosted VoIP Partner Program

There are several companies like this one—hosted VoIP providers, aggressive and focused—but this is the only one we know of that works with VARs and ISPs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 31, 2007]

Louisville, Ky.-based Smoothstone offers a complete portfolio of services. The company calls its offering Converged Communications as a Service (CCaaS) taking a tagline from the SaaS trend. Similar companies exist, but few of them. There's M5 in New York (see A Local VoIP Provider), and there are several others, but not very many.

VoIP is where the innovation is now, where the young people are going to work and founding companies that change the industry. In my mind, the most significant of these companies founded by young people is Digium, founded by the author of Asterisk. Digium is to Asterisk as RedHat (and others) are to Linux, and more exactly it is what Sendmail.com is to Sendmail.org, the commercial arm of an open source project.

ISPs are challenged by a changing market. You feel that you had all the skills you needed when you founded this business, but now you're hiring web developers or RF engineers or outsourcing software development to Lithuania or working with a software provider from Lithuania, and it's not what you expected, and now you want to do VoIP.

With some caveats, Smoothstone can do VoIP for you.

The backbone over the internet
The company can provide its services over a connection provided by an ISP, or it can work with a business that advises customers and offer everything, including the high bandwidth connection.

Smoothstone has an MPLS backbone. It has data centers in Louisville and Atlanta. Allegier says that avoiding the public internet allows the company to manage network components and ensure quality of service.

Is it a Cisco shop? "Whenever we deploy premise equipment, it's Cisco," says Allegier. "We have a Cisco Service Provider designation. We buy customer premise gear and we also buy tier 1 carrier class gear that we put in the core of the network, along with our proprietary software, our softswitch feature servers."

The channel
If you partner with Smoothstone, you'll talk to Drew Allegier, vice president of business development, or someone who reports to him. Allegier comes from a CLEC background, having worked for eight years for a CLEC called Lightyear communications (also based in Louisville, Ky.).

Smoothstone works well for end users that are businesses with multiple location. "For example, we have a large call center client with 47 locations over 7 or 8 states. Prior to Smoothstone, they had different PBX systems and different internet and communications providers in each location. They had all these different bills and vendors. With smoothstone, now they have all long distance and internet for all locations provided and billed by Smoothstone. The features (Cisco) are unified across their entire organization. They get to distribute calls over their entire agent base (a feature that we call Intelligent Call Control but that the industry calls Automatic Call Distribution). They have disaster recovery."

In order to get partners to offer all of these features to end users, Smoothstone educates its partners. Allegier says that the education depends on the type of partner, and sees three roughly equivalent segments in Smoothstone's partners:

The PBX people have been selling just a phone system and now can deliver PBX and carrier services. They're accustomed to a big money sale but no recurring revenue and can now get both. "They get a piece of the pie and increased mindshare," says Allegier.

The IT services and ISP group have been selling applications like Exchange, doing LAN administration, and maybe selling IBM gear, but have never controlled the telephony piece o the bill.

The VARs, such as Cisco and Avaya VARs, have sold Call Manager or IP phone systems but never sold the network piece.

One thing Smoothstone doesn't do is white label (although it might if the offer were good enough). "We never needed to," says Allegier. "We have so much business anyway. Not that we couldn't or wouldn't but there's no demand for it."

End users, he says, appreciate the quality of Smoothstone technical support, and understand that they're talking to Smoothstone, not to the partner. "When the client calls us, our client support group is our NOC. The client talks to our engineer."

Conclusion
Allegier has left the CLEC world behind. "I feel sorry for any CLEC that's still sending out big thick phone bills. There's no need for it, not with convergence. When you're a Smoothstone client, you get an admin login, you get your CDRs online and you can slice and dice them how you want. Some use it to bill back service for their clients. You can set up report queries and click the button and get the report. No paper!"

Convergence has changed the game. "It's here: Convergence is here, and it's a very disruptive force," says Allegier. "My mission in life right now is to reach out and help people adapt business models, increase revenue, bring more value to their clients. It's the beauty of IP. The whole world's going Ethernet."

— End