Phone (News - Alert) calling traffic is going through the roof, but because over-the-top apps make phone calls free, telcos haven’t benefitted from this growth, says IOVOX CEO and Co-founder Ryan Gallagher. His company aims to change that with the introduction of IOVOX Insights.

IOVOX Insights is a service that enables telcos to provide their small and medium customers with information about telephone calls. Dan Luis, IOVOX’s general manager of the Americas, says the solution is akin to Google (News - Alert) Analytics, but for the phone network as opposed to the Internet.

“Traditional phone bills don’t tell a story of business performance,” said Gallagher. “This can be extremely debilitating if your business relies on phone leads. But once a business realizes they are missing 20 percent or more of their calls during certain periods of the day, they immediately recognize the value of dynamic and interactive analytics. IOVOX Insights enables service providers to lock in existing revenue while creating a foundation for upsell.”

Among the calling parameters IOVOX Insights can deliver are call arrivals by date and time, calls’ geographic origins, marketing and advertising attribution through virtual numbers from the service provider, missed calls, and unique vs. repeat calls. IOVOX has two points of integration, added Luis, on the call records themselves and on the cloud PBX (News - Alert) the SMB is already using (in which an extra analytics tab is added to the interface).

IOVOX Insights is targeted a tier 1 through 3 cloud-based PBX providers. It will initially be aimed at those leveraing the BroadSoft platform, but will also reach users of other communications systems, including Asterisk (News - Alert) and homegrown solutions.

Gallagher said that IOVOX is trying to turn phone calls from logged event into events that can trigger real-time things. The company is also working to expand its offering to mobile handsets, which we may hear more about in as early as a month.

IOVOX is also in a couple of live betas that tie web and phone analytics. It did one test with a property portal, which can use the solution to see, for example, if a customer says his or her maximum housing spend is one amount online and another amount over the phone.

Coining the phrase purple minutes, which refers to traffic with a value-added component, Jeff Pulver (News - Alert) years ago began talking about the voice industry’s need to move beyond basic connectivity to bring something extra to the table for customers.

On a completely separate topic, International Women’s Day was last month, so I wanted to highlight here a new report from EY and The Peterson Institute for International Economics, which indicates that companies with women in at least 30 percent of their leadership roles can achieve up to a 6 percent increase in net margin.

"Companies that advance women into leadership roles are going to have the upper hand, with more engaged workforces, stronger cultures, and improved economic performance,” said Mark A. Weinberger, EY's global chairman & CEO. “We know that gender-balanced companies achieve better results.”

The report, which gathered data from nearly 22,000 publicly traded companies in 91 countries, breaks down female advancement by country. It indicates that companies in the following countries have seen the most progress in gender parity: Bulgaria, Latvia, the Philippines, Slovenia, and Romania. Companies in those countries have a respective 37 percent, 36 percent, 33 percent, 33 percent, and 32 percent share of female executives, according to the report. Meanwhile, the countries with the largest shares of females on company boards include Norway, with 40 percent; Latvia, with 25 percent; Italy, with 24 percent; Finland, with 23 percent; and Bulgaria, with 22 percent.

Speaking of women at work, this issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY features an interview with Hilary Gadda, who was recently named president of Women in the Channel, an organization of which she is a founding board member.

“Companies with more diversity are more innovative and competitive,” Gadda told us. “Studies show that the most successful companies empower women as leaders. According to the Global Leadership Forecast from DDI, companies in the top 20 percent financially have almost twice as many women in leadership roles as those in the bottom 20 percent. In fact, among top-performing companies, 30 to 40 percent of leadership positions were held by women. Educating tech executives about this is job one.”  

To read the entire interview with Gadda, turn to the Channel section of this magazine.