Intuitive Voice Technology’s (IVT) founder and CEO Chris Jones has a rich computer telephony background. He previously was a lead engineer for the elite “Advanced Voice Systems” group of MCI. There, he helped engineer countless innovations that helped shape the VoIP revolution of today.

 

Jonathan Rusk, IVT co-founder and VP of Technology, worked for Qwest Communications as an engineer of VoIP network and hardware solutions for small to medium sized enterprises. His experience includes Cisco, Nortel, Asterisk (News - Alert), and carrier services and solutions. Jonathan’s search for a more affordable and pleasant PBX experience met the perfect concept in IVT’s Evolution PBX (News - Alert), and thus a partnership was forged.

 

TMCnet spoke with Jones about his company, as well as the industry in general. The resulting interview appears below.

IVT: Intuitive Voice unites the PBX, Internet and telephone network in a simple to manage feature rich phone system. These features give businesses more control over their customer’s experience and operating costs than ever before.

 

Created by some of the leading Internet, telephony, and CTI engineers in the industry, Intuitive Voice Technology is bringing to the small business community features and support unparalleled in this market space. Our goal is to package best of breed technology and practices in an easy to use intuitive interface allowing small businesses to achieve an unimaginable return from their phone system investment.

 

IVT has focused on making our product line feature rich yet still easy for the average business owner to use. We recognize that most companies do not have an IT staff so we have removed the need for one from our system. Using a ‘try before you buy’ mentality, our products will prove their worth before you ever pay a dime.

 

At every turn intelligence has been built right into our systems. Our goal is to provide a system to your company that ensures your success in whatever industry you may be in.

 

Every IVT employee shares a deep passion for the company’s success and works hard to provide the best possible PBX experience to the end user whether it is a five-user system or a 50-user system.

 

IVT: To bring the SMB community the best possible return on their phone system investment by packaging the best of breed of technology and practices in an easy to use, intuitive interface.

 

IVT: Our typical customer is a small business in the five–40 extension range who is looking to take advantage of the current wave of telephony enhancements, and who needs the scalability and features that Evolution PBX provides.

 

IVT: Evolution PBX 2.4 (ETA 6/1/07) is the first truly plug-and-play PBX. It allows a business owner to simply plug in a standard IP phone into a network jack and make calls with zero provisioning to the phone or the system. This, coupled with robust features like music-on-hold, auto attendants, dial by name, telecommuting support (and many, many more features) with systems that start at $999 (Evolution Mini Package) and software-only packages for only $699. We are Cisco, Linksys, and Polycom (News - Alert) certified to sell and support these manufacturer’s end points. We also sell and support Analog and T1 Interface cards by Digium, Pika, and Sangoma (News - Alert).

 

iView Operator Console, together with Evolution PBX, makes deploying modern call management easy and cost-efficient. Working with the phone system is not tied to one location. Any operator can monitor the availability of the personnel from any location. iView has been designed in conjunction with Evolution PBX and communicates with Evolution PBX on multiple platforms. (e.g., Windows, Linux, Mac).

 

IntuitiveVoIP is not something that we planned on bringing to the market but were forced by our customer’s demand for a high-quality VoIP experience. IntuitiveVoIP delivers a direct IP connection to a Class 4 carrier class switch that is hosted directly on the VoIP backbone. Features include: free number porting, unlimited nationwide long-distance, unlimited inbound and outbound calling, low-cost international and toll-free numbers, and world class service and support.

 

IVT: Currently less than 10 percent of the SMB market has benefited from VoIP. This is primarily because they do not have an IT staff or someone they can trust to lead them in this direction. These companies in many cases have the most to gain by a highly functional phone system. Intuitive Voice has chosen to focus solely on this market segment and solve this issue for them. Our technology uses a combination of self provisioning, self discovery and self healing to remove the complexity from this technology.

 

IVT: After thorough testing of all the available cards on the market we found the Sangoma A200D delivered the best overall sound quality. The price is a bit more than the competitors, but when it comes to the quality of the voice, this really isn’t an area to compromise.

IVT: After testing several manufacturers’ products, the quality of the Sangoma cards was the hands-down winner from a user’s perspective of quality and ease of configuration.

 

IVT: The Sangoma relationship has allowed us to focus on the development of our product by reducing the number of support issues that we were experiencing with other hardware manufacturers. Sangoma’s technical support is extremely educated in their product line and able to bring issues to resolution often times immediately. This has allowed us to continue to bring more innovative and intuitive products to market.