Cloud-Based VoIP Provider: True UC Coming in for a Landing

Alteva is a hosted voice over IP service provider that markets itself as "a different kind of business Internet phone service." After speaking with the company's CEO, Bill Bumbernick, UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS believes Alteva is living up to that promise.

PB: What makes Alteva stand out in the hosted VoIP market?

BB: Our typical customer is probably about 250 seats. The applications and the APIs that we provide on top of our platform have really been a model where our customerscan really integrate any of their business processes. So if you've got workflow applications or procurement applications, or really anything that drives your business forward from a process perspective, we allow our customers to develop scripts or connect to the APIs that make your phones do fancy and fun things.

Where we've really kind of stumbled onto something really great is we have created a code repository, kind of an exchange. So all our customers can develop against our platform. But for us to approve it you've got to allow the code to go out there so we can put it in the code repository. And the next time a customer comes to us and says 'Hey, I want to do something like that,' we can say 'Here's part of it already built. You can tweak it for what you want it to do.' We've seen some pretty amazing things come out of that.

PB: Tell me more about the "fancy and fun things" you referred to earlier.

BB: We have a customer that is a third-party administration firm for 401K plans. They use a relatively little known workflow application. They've purchased that workflow applicationand it's a pretty slick little application and what it does is it manages tasks. They have a process where they do loan distribution; you can take out a loan against your 401K plan. There are forms that go along with that. There are requirements. I'm not a 401K expert, but there are a number of processes and steps that go along with being able to get the money out of your 401K plan. Those steps are all managed by this workflow system.

I'm going to make up the steps because I don't know what they are. But let's say the first thing is you need to submit an application, so you go to [the 401K administrator's]Web site and you fill it out and you submit it. It goes into the workflow application and the workflow moves it to a reviewer, somebody who needs to review the application for accuracy. Once it's reviewed for accuracy it gets submitted to the next person or automated process that might check the plan requirements. So there's maybe four or five stops along the way.

What the customer had done is integrated a couple of things within [that] and [the workflow tool] had some capabilities like screen scraping ... and it would scrape the telephone number field off the application. Now there is a call applicant button inside of their workflow system and as that application goes through the processes there are a number of times that the person at the [401K] firm needs to talk to the applicant. Instead of dialing, instead of the traditional method, now there is a button with click to call.

They've also adapted that for payroll processing so your employer's put money into your outbound 401K. There's a lot of outbound calling that happens in that process. If there' an issue with the payroll processing there's a call center queue there, and they've developed an application that feeds out dials into the call center queue so [the workflow application] will pop a screen [when needed] and automatically make the call.

PB: Some would call Alteva a "hosted VoIP" provider, but you're not particularly comfortable with that term. Why?

BB: Hosted VoIP is not very descriptive. I prefer telephony from the cloud because that's what we're really talking about here. VoIP today is just one component of many things that are coming together to create communications. The example that I just gave you is a component of integrating your telephony system with your workflow system, but it's a business process.

We're starting to see people use telephony in ways that really haven't been imagined before. Companies are starting to use their SAP or their Microsoft CRM solutions and tying in approvals for business efficiencies. And these are really where telephony's going and voice especially is going.

The term I use is a communications-enabled business process. And while VoIP is the technology that drives it it's a small piece. A communications-enabled business processes could have email, it could have text, it could have telephone. And all of this stuff is to create efficiencies in business. The cloud or the hosted part of this is what creates the rapid development - the ability to rapidly move that capability into businesses.

If you buy an Avaya PBX, you need to install it, implement it, configure it and develop your application for it on its API. And oftentimes you have to start from scratch to do that. They give you the API, which you have to pay more for by the way, but you still have to start from scratch to make everything work together.

In this model of the hosted world we give you the functionality as part of your service as far as the API, and we're going to help you get there to develop it. That's new and exciting and it helps customers get to where they're going.

PB: How does unified communications figure in to all this?

BB: UC has been a term that's been thrown around for some time. There are a lot of very watered-down UC capabilities - an application that maybe runs on my cell phone. The technology's just never really been there to warrant what I would call true UC.

But you're starting to really see it now with things like … Microsoft OCS and Exchange.

We are in the process of getting into production with a fully integrated solution that goes all the way form fax to email to OCS to your phone. And it's a product where it leverages some of the voice-enabled capabilities with OCS for presence and call control and LiveMeeting and your mobile phone and your desk phone all in one combined, bundled platform.

So if I'm in OCS and I want to dial you, I click on you and my phone rings. Even though my phone system isn't part of Exchange, it's all there. I can call my voice portal and move appointments around in Outlook.

There are a lot of companies that push hosted Exchange and hosted VoIP. With companies that use BroadSoft as a back end, as we are, we are the second or third to market that has actually done the integration. So this is very new.

PB: What's next on the hosted VoIP/UC front in terms of innovation?

BB: We're starting to see people use telephony in ways that have really haven't been imagined before. Companies are starting to use their SAP or their Microsoft CRM solutions and tying in approvals for business efficiencies. And these are really where telephony's going and voice especially is going.

I'll give you an example. Let's say one of my sales people was filling out a quote for a customer and had to compete and bring one of the prices down to an approved level. Sell a T1 for $100. We say 'no'. That throws up an alarm. When they put the quote into the system the system recognizes that there's something out of the ordinary and there's something wrong with that quote. Then it can text or email or call our VP of sales or the person that guy reports to, give the information about the issue - if it's telephone it'll read what would be in the email: here's the exception, here's the quote, here's the T1 price that was below level. Then the automated system will offer a menu saying: Press 1 if you want to approve.

So we're really starting to see people find ways to make business more efficient. And if you can get them to act as quickly as possiblethat means revenues.