This item originally appeared in the JULY issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY

It’s been a busy few months for Pac-West Telecomm (News - Alert) Inc. The company last fall completely changed its business model from that of a traditional carrier-focused CLEC to a cloud infrastructure company, and it’s been investing in and learning more about customer needs around this new strategy ever since. In addition, Pac-West just recently welcomed aboard a new CEO.

James Hensel, a long-time Pac-West board member, took the helm of the organization in May. Hensel has served as senior vice president of Columbia Ventures Corp., Pac-West’s parent company, since 2005. CVC’s other telecom portfolio companies include Hibernia Atlantic (News - Alert), Magnet Networks, Pivotel Group, and PocketiNet Communications.    

“CVC has long been enthusiastic about the growth, innovation and direction of Pac-West,” says Kenneth D. Peterson Jr., chairman and CEO of CVC. “With Jim taking an active role in the leadership of the company, he brings with him the resources of CVC as a whole to expand the growth potential and take Pac-West and Telastic to the next level.”

Telastic is a combination of telephony and elastic cloud computing. It describes Pac-West’s new family of on-demand carrier services. That includes a software-based session border controller – which includes policy and security management, routing, and LNP dips – that can be accessed via the cloud. Also under the Telastic umbrella is a white-label PBX (News - Alert) offering including billing, mediation and other support systems. This provides service providers with quick time to market and low-cost market entry.

Hensel says that Pac-West has put a tremendous amount of energy and resources into product development since launching Telastic. And the nationwide origination footprint, flexible termination options, and expanded security and functionality on the Telastic border controllers and white-label hosted VoIP, he says, have generated enormous interest from the industry.

“Pac-West has evolved into a new kind of carrier, bringing exciting on-demand cloud telecom services with the Telastic product line to an already impressive lineup of traditional carrier offerings,” says Hensel. “I’m looking forward to building on that growth and innovation to realize the tremendous potential in front of us.”

The company is no newcomer to telecom space. In fact, Pac-West has been around for more than 30 years. Its focus has been on wholesale since the mid 2000s, after Pac-West sold off its retail to operations to TelePacific, says Peter Gaylord, vice president of marketing and product management at Pac-West. And today, the company is focused on the cloud.

A couple years ago Pac-West management began a close evaluation of industry and technology trends, including what was happening with VoIP and the new focus on the network edge, and sought to answer the questions of what it means to be a carrier and how to sustain its business going forward. Pac-West saw a lot of carrier investment in heavy gear, including session border controllers and PBXs, and noted that this new infrastructure was requiring significant training and other human resources challenges for service providers, says Gaylord. That said, Pac-West saw an opportunity to create a service making it less expensive for carriers to launch VoIP. So Pac-West introduced its Telastic services a few months ago.  

Gaylord explains that Pac-West initially supplied SBC with least cost routing and transaction services as a service bureau offering that was fully hosted and centralized, but now it provides it as a software capability. By distributing it out in a software model, he says, Pac-West allows its carrier customers to put software in their networks on stock hardware – so those service provider customers have more control over their traffic.

As for the Telastic hosted VoIP solution, Gaylord says Pac-West had expected that service to see the most traction with mid-sized carriers. But, he adds, the company is seeing demand on the high and low ends of the carrier spectrum as well.

There are a lot of smaller players out there that want to do hosted VoIP, he says. Pac-West figured they were already doing SIP trunking or delivering PBX services via homegrown solutions based on open source solutions like Asterisk (News - Alert), Gaylord continues, but now it understands that these options may not be as efficient, so there’s an opportunity for Pac-West to deliver packaged option for Class 5-types features and transport.

Speaking to the larger carriers, Gaylord adds that Pac-West initially assumed this group would prefer a solution based on a BroadSoft (News - Alert) or Metaswitch solution. In fact, he says, some do, but some others are frustrated with those products or are cobbling together different PBX solutions gained through acquisitions, so they are seeking solutions that can normalize their operations without a lot of upfront investment.

Pac-West aims to be there with the right solutions for these customers.