VAchieving Excellence

The editorial staff of INTERNET TELEPHONY® magazine is proud to announce the winners of the 2007 INTERNET TELEPHONY® Excellence Awards. These companies are as varied as there are products that fit under the IP telephony umbrella. In fact the only thing more varied than the vendors serving their customers are the customers themselves. And, as we can see from the following companies, they are increasingly turning to IP Communications solutions to build their businesses. This year’s crop of award winners submitted case studies featuring a wide array of end users. For example:

One of the largest Windows Mobile-based smart-phone OEMs in the world has chosen one winner’s technology to be integrated into its tri-band 3G phones, enabling them to offer incredibly fast speeds for Internet and video calling.

A Norwegian next-gen telco offering voice, data, IPTV, and video services over Fiber-to-the-Home selected the solution of one of this year’s winners to enhance their mobile offering and expand their reach further into the mobile domain, as well as reduce churn of subscribers once they were on the network. The addition of quad play helps the carrier to confirm their reputation as a pioneering communications provider by supplying innovative FMC services that integrate VoIP with GSM and WLAN.

One winner’s routing solution allowed their customer - a major Taiwanese telecommunications service provider - to effectively scale their residential and business service offerings to a nationwide customer base while simplifying overall network architecture and operations.

A Vietnamese expatriate wanted to find a way for his displaced countrymen to communicate. In the 1990s he founded a multifaceted business service provider for the Asian Community including: travel, accounting, calling cards and pin-less numbers. More recently, this entrepreneur also had a vision to connect his business enterprises and expand his services into the VoIP world and connect his U.S. customer base directly with Vietnam and Asia. By taking advantage of the services of one of this year’s winners, he was able to build a successful business.

A Life Sciences consultancy providing professional services and learning solutions to the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical devices industries needed a solution to help deliver superior service at reasonable cost, through “nomadic” teams of industry specialists. The platform had to be flexible enough to support a growing, geographically dispersed and regularly relocating professional staff. A hosted VoIP PBX from one of the award winners proved to be the solution.

The Bedford County, Pennsylvania Government encompasses a number of important public service entities. In 2007, the construction of a new $20M state-of-the-art facility was completed to bring together county department services under one roof. Because the previous phone systems at the various locations were antiquated, Bedford County opted to purchase and install a new 350 station communications system to meet the voice and data requirements for its new facility. They installed a converged solution from one of the award winners to support both digital and IP applications and offer the flexibility for users to grow their telephone system as needs adjust.

A major medical insurance company turned to an award-winning solutions provider to institute a custom Click-to-Talk solution to improve response times and increase customer satisfaction. The new solution is credited with reducing on-hold times from 50 minutes to about 12 seconds, allowing health care providers to better focus on their vital role in caring for their patients. Because the customer calls enter the queue via the Internet, neither the insurer nor the provider incurs telephone toll charges.

When a third-party logistics service provider offering services to companies that want to outsource the physical distribution of manufactured products began planning to move its operation to a new 100,000 square-foot warehouse, management was debating whether to invest in moving and reprogramming their existing phone system, which didn’t provide the advanced features they needed, or go shopping for a new phone system. The firm decided to go with a phone system from one of the award winners.

A 60-person information technology consulting firm based in Manhattan has been delivering the promise of technology and business efficiency to small to mid-sized organizations. The company found itself needing to increase internal productivity and customer service levels by tracking support calls. They deployed an on-demand solution from an award-winning company to enable their decision makers and call center supervisors at mid-size businesses make intelligent decisions about staffing and call flow. The firm’s average speedto- answer is now 10 percent faster, even with a 30 percent call volume increase during the same period with no increase in headcount.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2007 INTERNET TELEPHONY ® Excellence Awards. These companies all have proven products and services, and most importantly, customers that are willing to speak up and offer themselves as references.

And as we like to remind readers, always check out those customer references. These days - through the efforts of companies such as those gracing our winners’ list - that’s becoming ever-easier to do.

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