There is little doubt that the market for cloud-based unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) has caught the imagination of U.S. businesses of all sizes. In an effort to expand its visibility in this fast-growing market Telesphere (News - Alert), a leading UCaaS provider has partnered with one of the largest master agents in the country, Telarus. The agreement means that Telarus will now market Telesphere's hosted solutions for voice, data, video and other managed services through its extensive network of agents and sub-agents throughout the United States.
As a result of the agreement, Telarus (News - Alert) partners will have access to Telesphere's entire portfolio of enterprise-level, cloud-based services including VoIP, videoconferencing, internet connectivity, WAN management and contact center solutions. Telesphere's team of dedicated indirect channel managers and network engineers will support Telarus agents and partners to enable fast provisioning and consistently deliver high-quality end user experience and customer satisfaction.
"We're excited to partner with Telarus and their family of sub-agents to help bring our products and services to the Telarus national base of enterprise customers. We have always had deep admiration for Telarus and their standing as one of the preeminent leaders in the telecom distribution industry. Telesphere's expansive and cutting-edge solutions, coupled with Telarus' strength in the sales channel, will be a win-win for all," said Telesphere's Director of Indirect Channel Skyler Stewart.
"Enterprise businesses are moving their communications services to the cloud for security and mobility, as well as redundancy and collaboration. Telesphere has led the field with its full slate of innovative hosted solutions," said Telarus' Vice President of Business Development Lanny Gray. "Telesphere's suite of solutions will be an outstanding addition to our portfolio and will provide our partners with a superior, high quality UCaaS option for their clients."
The fact of the matter is that the need to provide businesses with much more functionality than their installed base of legacy communications systems, and the cloud-based solutions have proven to be attractive particularly to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) many master agents and their sub-agents have attempted to shift their customers to communications services hosted by a third party. The challenge has been in many instances that their selected partners came up short in providing the level of engineering support, sales support and quality of service requisite for market and channel success.
Sensitive to market realities and seeking to expand its reach, Telesphere has paid attention to master agent and sub-agent needs. It provides them with:
A network with more points of presence than any other national provider of its kind in addition to a fully managed, private IP MPLS network -- the largest in the nation –that offers private SIP trunking, managed firewalls, carrier-grade performance for wireline and mobile convergence.
24/7 live support from two geographically diverse U.S. locations to enable an immediate response to end users.
Comprehensive, hands-on engineering and sales support, including a Web portal where master agents and their sub-agents can get circuit quotes quickly – often instantly – to build proposals, validate geographic capabilities, check customer tickets and project milestones.
More than a decade of experience serving the enterprise market, with a churn rate of less than 1 percent and an average customer life of more than eight years.
It should be noted that Phoenix, AZ-based Telesphere has been nationally recognized for the third consecutive year as one of the fastest growing companies by the Inc. 500/5000 list, recognized as one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte (News - Alert)'s 2013 Technology Fast 500™ along with being named by CareerBuilder, the Arizona Republic, and Top Companies AZ, as one of the best companies to work for in Arizona. The partnership with Telarus is a key strategic move since the company, whose focus is on enterprise WAN and high-capacity bandwidth solutions, has been named the top Master Agent by the members of the Telecom Association (News - Alert) in each of the past three years—an accomplishment the company says makes it the first and only company in the carrier channel to do so.
While the hosted solutions market for UCaaS is a crowded one, illustrating just how robust the opportunities for growth are as customers recognize the urgency to move to next generation communications solutions in order to stay competitive, the combination of a UCaaS network services provider with a strong channel is certainly something that will capture the attention of both customers and competitors.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker