Hosted VoIP draws larger enterprises, Telesphere said

Having cut its teeth on the small to mid-sized business market, hosted VoIP player Telesphere is now finding larger enterprises are attracted to hosted PBX offerings because of their low capital requirements.

“Our sweet spot is [companies with] 20 to 200 employees, but that has really changed during this economic downturn,” said Telesphere CEO Clark Peterson. “The dramatic growth we have seen in the last six to eight months has come because economic pressures are pushing larger businesses, especially those multi-locations, to look for smarter ways to use capital.”

As a result, companies are choosing a hosted PBX option over buying an IP PBX for each office and like the cost-effectiveness of combining voice and data over a single connection, Peterson said. “That’s been the pleasant surprise. In the past, the hosted space appealed to medium to small businesses – they were the ones most excited to have Fortune 100 type features they would never be able to afford in their own box.  Now, the larger guys also appreciate the huge capital savings in  not having to purchase, upgrade and maintain all those PBXs. Plus, now their IT guys can focus on LAN issues, not voice issues. They don’t need people to babysit the PBX.”

Telesphere, which has customers in 44 states, is now expanding its points of presence, drawing on an additional $15 million round of funding announced this week. The new round of funding came from existing investors including Rally Capital, Hawkeye Investments LLC and Greenspun Corporation and will be used for expansion and possible acquisitions. Rally Capital’s chairman, Dennis Weibling, is also chairman of Telesphere’s board and has an extensive telecom background with companies such as Nextel Partners, XO Communications and Clearwire, Peterson said. John Chapple, former CEO of Nextel Partners, heads Hawkeye Capital. 

“The people involved are not just financing us, they are some of the most respected telecom operators and financiers of last several decades,” Peterson said.
The economic downturn has helped make the case for hosted IP voice services in other ways, Peterson said.

What we are seeing now is that a lot of companies have had to lay people off,” Peterson said. “They are really sensitive to getting more production out of less people. All the Unified Communications features, all the convergence with the cellphone, in unison with landline phone, all these features are looked at as real productivity tools, to help make a smaller group of people perform close to productivity they had with larger groups.”

Telesphere offers a variety of productivity tools including simultaneous ring services for office and cell phones, seamless handoff of calls between cell phones and office phones, click-to-dial from PC directories, visual voice mail to email and fax to email and Telesphere Anywhere which enables employees at multiple locations to have four-digit dialing and local calling as if they were in the same location.

Multi-location businesses also are feeling the pull, since often they have different equipment, at varying stages of maturity, at different locations, Peterson said. Using a hosted PBX service enables them to upgrade offices as older telecom gear is replaced, and blend the service with locations that may have newer, IP-based PBXs, without a company-wide forklift upgrade, he said.

Telesphere is not announcing its new markets, for competitive reasons, but will be adding new physical offices with local general managers and sales people, Peterson said. He admitted much of the current Telesphere marketing is very grassroots, based on the Web and word of mouth.