DIDs FEATURED ARTICLE

After having sold its retail division in 2010, O1 Communications (News - Alert) is getting back into the small and medium-size business (SMB) communications market with voice-over-IP and unified communications (UC) services. A recent BroadSoft (News - Alert) announcement confirms that O1 Communications has chosen BroadCloud as its hosted service of choice for delivery of its own branded product.

BroadSoft's BroadCloud serves as a cloud-based platform that offers all manner of UC functions such as voice and video in addition to sales and product management support. Enterprise users can make contact with their customers while allowing sales teams access to reporting and assessment tools and product management teams access to branding, product listing, and pricing tools. The full, white-label package will provide an avenue for O1 Communications to bring its O1 Phone (News - Alert) VoiceStream back into the game.

Josh Holmberg, the vice president of sales at BroadSoft, commented on the quick nature in which O1 Communications can get its service operational.

“Forward-thinking service providers such as O1 Communications are increasingly looking to rapidly and easily customize and take to market voice and UC services that meet the diverse communications needs of their business customers,” Holmberg said. “With BroadCloud powering its compelling VoiceStream cloud offering, O1 Communications is strongly positioned with an affordable, easy-to-use, and feature-rich solution.”

Part of this new enterprise product will mean the addition of direct inward dialing (DID) support. Local phone numbers for customers means they can more easily reach customer service in times of need. The use of DIDs gives enterprises the chance to offer consumers a direct line to support agents. DID providers, such as Vitcom, will play a major role in this equation. Enterprises can look to Vitcom to offer them the service numbers they need, and VoiceStream will handle those numbers by connecting customers with agents.

VoiceStream will leverage the power of BroadSoft UC-One that gathers voice, video, business directories, presence, and many other features inside a single application. For businesses, this will mean universal access to those services on desktop and mobile, as well as a familiar look and feel across devices. This pairing definitely represents a win for O1 Communications because it will need setup speed and operational consistency to make a statement in the market, and it should find both those elements with BroadSoft.