The company, which has no direct sales force to compete with its partners, offers three levels of partnership programs for ISPs and WISPs.

by Jeff Goldman [February 27, 2008]

Nuvio was founded in 2003 by CEO Jason Talley in order to provide a low-cost PBX solution for another company he was starting at the time. In the years since then, according to Courtney Briggs, Nuvio's vice president for channel sales, the company has grown to become a true VoIP carrier. "Our footprint has expanded along with our feature set," she says.

The company's focus is on providing an affordable hosted VoIP service for businesses. "Our partners are able to go into a small- to medium-sized (or even a large enterprise-sized) customer and offer features that come on a traditional PBX system that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, with call transfer, call forwarding, and all the robust features that you would expect," Briggs says. "And we're able to do that without having to put premise-based equipment there—so there's no huge capital expenditure up front."

Nuvio Corporation 8500 West 110th Street, Suite 525 Overland Park, Kansas 66210 Tel: (866) 466-8846 Fax: (913) 498-1810 Web contact form

And Briggs says that while customers can come to Nuvio's website and purchase the service directly from them, the company has no direct sales force of its own—so Nuvio's partners don't have to worry about that kind of competition. "All of our sales are done through indirect channels, through our partners—through an ISP, a cable company, what have you," she says.

While nothing has to be installed at the customer premises other than the phones themselves, Briggs says a truck roll—particularly for larger customers—can be a smart move on an ISP's part as way of increasing customer loyalty. "For them, this is just another product that, one, makes the customer sticky, and two, they already have the staff that can go out and do a truck roll to install it," she says.

Partner options
Nuvio offers three different partner programs: the Carrier Program, the Private Label Partner Program, and the Agent Program.

The Carrier Program, Briggs says, is specifically targeted at ISPs, WISPs, cable companies, and CLECs. "They already have an established customer base, they already have a current telecom product they're selling—and we're just their network, basically," she says. "Their end user does not even know we exist. They do the provisioning, the billing, Tier 1 support, Tier 2 support. We just do the Tier 3 support, and we provide the dial tone piece and the actual network."

The Private Label Partner (PLP) Program, on the other hand, involves more handholding on Nuvio's part. "It's geared toward a company that wants to go to wholesale, but maybe they don't have the staff or the billing system at this point," Briggs says. "So we do everything with that partner's name and logo—the billing, the invoicing, the website: everything's done as ABC Company. There's just one little thing that says, 'Powered by Nuvio.' So we're not as transparent as we are with our carrier program, but we're doing it all, except for the sales."

Finally, the Agent Program is more like a simple referral option: everything is sold in Nuvio's name, and the agent simply receives a monthly commission.

A business focus
While carrier partners simply pay Nuvio a wholesale rate and can then charge their end users whatever monthly rate they choose, both PLP and Agent partners are required to charge Nuvio's published rates, from which they receive a monthly commission. Agents receive 100 percent of what's billed for the first month, then either 12, 15 or 17 percent monthly, depending on volume. PLP partners get a higher monthly commission than agents do: 15, 20 or 25 percent depending on volume.

Briggs says that while Nuvio will allow all Carrier and some PLP partners to target residential users, the business market makes much for sense for the company's offering. "I can't compete with a Packet8; I can't compete with a Vonage," she says. "I'm not going to give away the farm to get a residential customer; they're not as loyal. There's not enough stuff to keep them sticky, to keep them with you."

With two redundant data centers in Kansas and Texas, and a third soon to be deployed in California, Briggs says Nuvio's connectivity and reliability are hard to match. "And we have pipes coming in from every Tier 1 and Tier 2 provider possible, because with VoIP, the less hops you need to make, the cleaner your connection is," she says.

And for its ISP partners, Briggs says, the company's focus on partnerships makes a real difference. "Because we only do partner sales and we don't have a direct sales force, our staff is 110 percent committed to supporting our partners and their end users," she says.

— End