With a focus on the needs of small businesses, Intelliverse's Talking Planet wholesale VoIP offering promises to get you up and running in 14 days or less, and provides a path for insourcing your VoIP service later.

by Jeff Goldman [May 23, 2007]

Intelliverse was founded in 1986 as Voicecom Telecommunications—the company is now a wholesale provider of hosted VoIP solutions for both residential and small business customers. "We target ISPs, cable companies and CLECs, in that order," says company vice president of marketing Frank Paterno.

The company's wholesale VoIP platform, Talking Planet, is private labeled at every step of the process—including shipping. End user devices are sent directly from the warehouse to the user with everything private labeled, from the return address to the RMA process to tier one technical support.

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While the solution is targeted at both residential and business users, Paterno says its strengths are best suited to business. "We really differentiate ourselves by being able to offer a true small business application that has features that you would expect and get from a premise-based PBX solution, a key system or even a Centrex service," he says.

And it isn't built around another company's product. "At the core of our network is a feature server that we ourselves have designed," Paterno says. "We own the intellectual property for it, and we have our own development staff. Because we picked a pretty specific market space, the very small business, we're able to take our products and services and keep them very specifically tailored for that market."

Selling points
One key strength of the solution, Paterno says, is compatibility—and that's true for everything from how you connect to the internet to what equipment you want to use. "If you've got analog phones and you want to keep them, that's fine," he says. "If you want to upgrade to IP phones, that's fine."

Intelliverse's speed to market is another key selling point, particularly for ISPs. "We came out with a press release about eight months ago—and we've had our feet held to it and have achieved it—that we can get you up and running in 14 days or less," Paterno says.

Still, Paterno says there's often a delay in advance of that 14-day process while the ISP decides on a name for the product, pricing, etc.—though Intelliverse does its best to help with that. "We can share some best practice scenarios in terms of branding and pricing, plan creation, what's included, what's not included," he says.

The company is fully CALEA-compliant through an agreement with a trusted third party. "One of our strategies is to do what we do best, and use best of breed where it's not our core competency," Paterno says. "CALEA compliance we didn't see as something that was our core competency, so we went to one of the best of breed providers out there."

Pricing—and ownership
Intelliverse charges no startup fees, and has no minimum commitments. The point, Paterno says, is that one of the best arguments for going with an outsourced provider like Intelliverse is the lack of upfront costs. While a company like Cisco might offer a solid VoIP solution, Paterno says, that's still a hardware solution that will require significant capital expenditure—and for most small businesses, that's simply not an option.

Finally, one thing that Paterno says is very compelling for ISPs is the fact that they can start by outsourcing everything to Intelliverse, then take over the offering piece by piece if they want to. "The ISP really can just sign on the line, tell us what they want their branding to look like, and be out of it—that's what lets them get to market very quickly," he says. "And then as the program proves itself to them and they start to gain more and more customers, they can choose to bring in-house certain elements of the product."

In fact, Paterno says, that process is usually very predictable. "A few months into the launch, they'll start talking about taking more levels of customer service internally, then they'll start talking about having relationships with the device manufacturers directly rather than buying through us—and then they might talk about using their own warehouse and integrating with that rather than using the one we have," he says.

As a result, if an ISP doesn't want to paint themselves into a corner by becoming dependent on an outsourced solution, Intelliverse can be particularly attractive. "The fact that they know they can grow out of some of these ancillary services and take them on themselves—that, I think, has won us quite a few deals," Paterno says.

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