Alianza's offering seems complete, but company's CEO wants to offer even more.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 9, 2007]

It's time to put the "service" back in "service provider." ISPs have been offering value-added services for years, but nowadays companies are offering services platforms.

You've heard of Jamcracker, and you've heard of 3Tera. You're certainly familiar with hosted VoIP from providers like CommPartners.

Last week, we met with Brian Beutler, CEO of Lindon, Utah-based Alianza, a company offering hosted VoIP (and, soon, other hosted apps) to service providers.

So what makes Alianza different?
The company says its product is designed for CLECs and WISPs and carriers, aiming at the tier 2 market, where companies have 5,000 business customers or 250,000 residential customers. "Our target is the mid-market. We're selling to companies that need to compete with the ILEC," says Beutler.

The company has been selling this solution around the world over the past three years, with success in Asia and South and Central America. Now it is breaking into the U.S. market. It is ISP-Planet's editorial position that companies in this position offer growing ISPs a good opportunity. The company at this stage is willing to work with smaller ISPs, and will not work with them later.

At the moment, the company offers fully integrated unified communications, with integration into provisioning, billing, and help desk systems. That's an impressive list of features, but, says Beutler, it's just the start.

Alianza call report

The company's ambition is to create an application marketplace in which ISPs can write applications for the Alianza system, upload them, and sell them to other ISPs around the world. The system is built on .Net with XML APIs. A few components, such as the session border controllers (SBCs) are licensed from third parties but the majority of the infrastructure was built in house.

Beutler is eager to see what applications the ISPs will build. "I believe that the service provider knows this market better than we do, so we provide the platform and enable the service provide to do what it wants."

Compared to Asterisk
Why would someone use your platform, which is closed, instead of an open source platform like Linux or Asterisk? "There's no redundancy on Asterisk. Our platform is carrier class. There's no room for error in voice. Many ISPs are trying to get 5,000 extensions on a single Asterisk server, but Asterisk is designed for the SMB market. Technically, you can do anything with the time and money, but we have built a platform that integrates other applications including billing, and we enable ISPs to scale the applications."

Time is key. Beutler says that because it's a hosted system, ISPs can become fully operational quite rapidly. "With our fast start program, and ISP can be up and running in 15 to 30 days."

Of course, a customized solution would take longer to set up.

Pricing and availability
The Alianza platform, offering integrated communications, billing, and trouble ticketing, all as a hosted service, is available now. Pricing was not disclosed.

The application exchange will be available next year.

—End