Telephony services specialist InPhonex and calling services company
Ringio announced a partnership to provide small to medium-size
businesses (SMBs) with access to private branch exchange (PBX) features
and functionality. Both companies introduced the service, Ringio On
InPhonex (ROI), at IT Expo in Los Angeles earlier this week.
ROI incorporates features from Ringio, a cloud-based rich calling
service, and InPhonex’s telephony platform. Features include
server-free advanced call center functions designed for SMB users,
including personalized greetings, the ability to intelligently route
and forward calls based on the caller's history and a learning
knowledge base about callers and other advanced collaboration features,
such as presence, notes and contact sharing.
"Unlike most hosted PBX providers, which take existing on-premise PBX
platforms and move them to the cloud, Ringio was developed from the
beginning as an intelligent, cloud-based PBX to address the unique
needs of SMBs," said Ringio co-founder and chairman Michael Zirngibl.
"Ringio On InPhonex builds upon that goal by giving SMB customers a
single provider for their telephony, call center and PBX needs."
Other features include a mobile application, intelligent screen-pop
capability, which presents CRM data in the context of calls, the
ability to use existing soft phones and VoIP phones with Ringio, local
number portability (LNP) in 15 countries, customized managed calling
plans, including bulk calling, worldwide calling and personalized
calling plans and a global telecommunications footprint that includes
75 countries.
Ringio On InPhonex has an average cost per user of about $40 per month
for unlimited calling and an end-to-end solution. Now in beta release,
a joint company statement said Ringio On InPhonex is expected to become
generally available by the end of 2010. InPhonex is recruiting and
selling ROI through channel partners, which can white-label the service
and resell it to SMBs, while Ringio is selling the service directly to
SMB customers. Other InPhonex offerings include multiple applications,
services and
utilities, such as VolP, hosted PBX, SIP trunking, product creation and
provisioning.
"ROI is an attractive addition to the offerings we provide our
thousands of value-added reseller partners," said InPhonex chief
marketing officer Matt Bramson. "Not only does ROI enrich resellers'
opportunity to target SMBs – the largest segment of the enterprise
market – but it also gives them a set of features unlike any other in
the market."
A Frost & Sullivan report predicted a solid future growth for
SIP and VoIP technologies in its July “North American VoIP Access and
SIP Trunking Services Markets” report, though it warns that stiff
competition would drive down margins for service providers. The report
predicts the market will continue to build on its "impressive,
downturn-defying" 40.1 percent growth in user base and 22.3 percent
growth in revenues in 2009, as enterprises look for cost-effective
alternatives to their legacy time division multiplexing (TDM)-based
communication infrastructure.
"The majority of the installed customer premises equipment is still TDM
private branch exchange [PBX] and therefore, a large percentage of the
installed services base requires the deployment of media gateways for
protocol conversion, while only a small percentage is direct/native SIP
trunks connecting to SIP-enabled IP telephony platforms," wrote Frost
& Sullivan Program Director Elka Popova. "Going forward, that ratio
is bound to change as customers increasingly replace their legacy
systems with new, hybrid or pure IP telephony equipment."
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