The company's hosted communications services are designed to meet the needs of wireless broadband providers.

by Jeff Goldman [October 23, 2008]

Alianza, founded in 2004, offers hosted communications services specifically for wireless broadband providers. "We're really laser-focused on supporting voice over WiMAX," says company CEO Brian Beutler. "There are some very unique things that have to do with how voice is handled, how QoS is handled, the provisioning, on wireless implementations versus, say, a DSL network."

And for WiMAX providers, Beutler says, voice is a true killer app. "It doubles their ARPU, the demand runs across multiple customer demographics, there's a high demand for bundled services, it increases their ROI, decreases churn—there's going to be a lot of applications that get thrown at wireless internet service providers over that fat pipe they'll be delivering, but for them, voice is key," he says.

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A key differentiator for Alianza is the fact that everything in its offering is proprietary aside from a session border controller from Acme Packet. "We've actually stripped down the technology on each one of the components and built a logic layer on top of it with a set of APIs, so that when the service provider engages with Alianza, they have one portal to manage them all," Beutler says.

The result, Beutler says, is not only improved performance but significantly lower cost. "Although we did it from a technology standpoint first, we've found in the market that one of the key benefits for our customers is the pricing advantage it creates… because we're not beholden to those third party applications that our competitors embed in their platforms," he says.

Options and partnerships
Alianza doesn't require that its customers use the company for carrier termination. "From a service provider perspective, that creates a lot of comfort, because if you're signing on with somebody long term and they have control both over your platform and the carrier termination cost—which is really the elastic piece of the cost equation—that becomes, strategically, a pretty weak position to be in," Beutler says.

Instead, Beutler says, Alianza will happily connect to any carrier the service provider chooses. "You want Level 3 on originating numbers for inbound?" he says. "No problem: we can do it for you. You want 360networks, Verizon, AT&T, Global Crossing? Great. You want to mix and match on the termination? No problem. You want another carrier for international? You bet. You want to interconnect with your local CLEC that you're already buying data from? We'll do it. And that creates a lot of flexibility."

Alianza is developing partnerships with a wide variety of WiMAX equipment manufacturers. "We partner with them to ensure a quality experience for the customer: everything from certifying their CPE on our network so that it's plug-and-play authentication for the customer, which makes the service provider's life easier, all the way through certifying core infrastructure and how voice is treated on the network," Beutler says.

Those relationships, Beutler says, benefit the manufacturers as much as they do Alianza. "When they go in and they build a business case for a customer, and they peg Alianza onto it instead of a build-your-own-voice solution, they're decreasing the capex for voice, and increasing it for the service provider's expansion of the network, which puts money in the infrastructure provider's back pocket, but it also accelerates the time to market with voice applications for the service provider," he says. "It's a no-brainer."

Commitment to the market
Pricing for the service is structured per user, per extension, or per seat, with the monthly cost depending on the product set chosen. "We have three main product sets: we have a residential plan, a business plan (which is a virtual PBX and total unified communications functionality, find-me/follow-me, hunt groups, IVR, auto attendant, extension dialing) and then the third product is SIP trunking," Beutler says.

Beutler says there's no minimum size of service provider that Alianza targets—the most important factor is the provider's level of commitment to the market. "When we engage with a customer, it's much more about future-looking plans, and making sure that we're aligned," he says. "So we ask questions like what are your spectrum holdings, what's your funding plan, who are your partners on the WiMAX infrastructure side, how many employees do you have, what's their background, what's your investors' appetites for growth."

The cost savings, quick time to market, and ease of deployment inherent in an outsourced solution like Alianza's, Beutler says, make it especially attractive to companies in emerging markets. "We don't just cater to customers in the U.S.—we have a slew of customers across Latin America, and we'll be expanding into Europe and Asia/Pac over the next 12 months," he says.

Ultimately, Beutler says, Alianza's key strengths lie in its focus on the specific needs of WiMAX service providers. "For the service provider that's looking to launch a voice solution without capex, while at the same time maintaining control and having the ability to route to their own carriers, we're a stellar choice to partner with," he says.

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