The company's Cortex middleware solution aims to give a service provider maximum flexibility and control in designing and managing a VoIP offering.

by Jeff Goldman [August 6, 2008]

VoIP Logic was founded as a bootstrap startup in 2003, with the simple goal of improving the way VoIP deployments were managed. "There was a real dearth of expertise as VoIP technology was being deployed in 2003—so it was about getting that technology via service providers to customers in ways that were cost effective and worked well," recalls company CEO Micah Singer.

In 2006, with about 18 employees and a little under $2 million in revenue, VoIP Logic took on $1.25 million in Series A and B financing from its first and only institutional investor, 21Ventures LLC. The company now has 32 employees, and 21Ventures' total investment in VoIP Logic to date is $2.3 million.

VoIP Logic 529 Main Street Williamstown, MA 01267 Tel: (310) 279-4700

The company's offering is built around Cortex, a flexible OSS/BSS middleware application that's pre-integrated with a variety of best-of-breed products including Sylantro's Synergy platform, the NextPoint MSX session border controller, Iperia's ActiveEdge software, Highdeal's Transactive billing engine, and IVR Technologies' Talking SIP software.

The basic idea, Singer says, is similar to the one behind competitors like TeleGea (now Ensim) or Atreus (now part of Sonus). "It's the idea of building adapters into the various systems, and then allowing those adapters to have customized business logic defined by each service provider as they go to market," he says.

A whole new option
As Singer points out, that puts his company somewhere between a value added reseller, a managed service provider and a systems integrator. "Managed services is really the evolution of the systems integrator," he says. "A systems integrator would come in, integrate systems, and provide some kind of low level ongoing support. We come in, and it's really an ongoing relationship we're establishing with you—but we start with integration."

And Singer says the company is more active on the systems integrator side than its competitors. "We get involved in the engineering part as well, deploying the best of breed systems—not just installing an OSS around them or integrating them with an OSS," he says. "We do everything from ordering, sourcing, rack and stack, bringing it up into service, training, testing and ongoing support."

Ultimately, Singer says, the aim is to give companies a whole new option for deploying this kind of service. "Traditionally, you had two choices as you went to market as a service provider," he says. "You could go as a facilities-based provider with huge capex up front, and very substantial opex to run all the facilities and systems; or you could go out as a reseller, and a reseller lacks the real control of your destiny. What we've been trying to do since day one is say, 'Without the big investment, you can basically go out with the control you want: facilities control at a reseller cost.'"

Pricing for the solution, Singer says, begins with startup costs that can vary widely depending on the amount of customization and integration required, starting around $15,000. "Then there's what we call on-demand pricing, per seat used… so you could have a Sylantro seat, an auto-attendant seat, a unified messaging seat—but generally, at the lowest level, it's about $5 to $8 a month," he says.

Key selling points
Singer says the support the company provides is a key strength, along with the fact that there's a single point of contact for that support, regardless of the number or variety of systems deployed. "Having a large NOC, having a lot of resources, and having 24/7 support coverage are really important when you have software as a service or any kind of managed application," he says. "We really have hands-on, 24/7 support: we're doing something like 40 tickets a day."

Still, Singer says VoIP Logic's basic selling point always comes back to Cortex's inherent customizability. "A lot of our competitors offering VoIP managed services are pretty much at the mercy of, if it's Broadsoft, whatever the Broadsoft system can do, or if it's Sylantro, whatever the Sylantro system can do," he says. "Not so with VoIP Logic—it's really what Cortex can do. Can you integrate it with our Web site? Sure. Can you present billing and messaging and the phone service in one window? Of course. Can resellers and agents sell our product? Sure? Under their logo? Sure. So it's really about giving them flexibility."

And that's equally true, Singer says, for larger providers. "When you decide to launch in France and you need to integrate with a French payment processing agency, no problem," he says. "When you decide to launch in China and everything has to support Unicode in the system, not a problem."

At the same time, Singer is quick to point out that VoIP Logic isn't for everyone. "Our sales process is consultative," he says. "Sometimes we're not the best option…we tend to look for people who want to have a bit more control of their destiny, not a reseller program…it's about finding the right niche—the people who want control—and we really strive to give them the advice that lets them make a good decision."

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