In a class by itself: BroadSoft solves service problem for CLECs

A non-traditional competitive local exchange carrier has found an equally non-traditional solution for providing some very traditional telephone services.

With Class 4 switches in New York City; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Seattle, long-distance and international callback service provider International Telcom had built its business as a call delivery service to call centers and other businesses with large inbound call volumes.

Now, ITL Metro, the CLEC arm of International Telcom, is using those same switches with a solution from BroadSoft to provide full service telecom capabilities to the small business market.

"Because of our call delivery service, it made no sense to build a Class 5 switch," said Joel Eisenberg, president and CEO of ITL Metro.

Most service providers deploy Class 5 switches to support local loops and provide enhanced services such as call forwarding and a myriad of Centrex and other features. "Even most CLECs have bought Class 5s because of the package deals that Lucent and Nortel have been throwing in their faces," said John Kuzma, senior analyst at RHK.

But ITL Metro stayed with its Class 4 switches and turned to BroadSoft to help it move into the CLEC business. ITL Metro will implement BroadWorks, a platform to provide a service delivery and service creation environment to its Class 4 switches.

BroadWorks is targeted at all integrated communications providers. It blends the public circuit-switched network and packet-switched environments and communicates with multiservice access devices using session initiation protocol.

The Web interface to the service creation environment was particularly interesting to ITL Metro because of the company's use of independent agents, Eisenberg said. The CLEC relies on independent agents as its sales force and acknowledges the potential inefficiencies of that strategy - especially when it comes to altering services.

"The biggest complaint about independent agents is that it gets so labor-intensive. To make a simple change in service, a customer has to call an agent, the agent calls the reseller, the reseller calls the underlying CLEC and, if you're lucky, the change takes place," Eisenberg said. BroadWorks allows the agent and the customer to make service changes via the Web.

"BroadWorks can be a good adjunct for companies that want to get into Web-enablement," Kuzma said. "If [BroadSoft] can show the CLECs what it can do for small businesses and residences, that people can now have Web-based control of their features, I think there is a great market for that. But, everybody is working on the Web angle, [including] softswitch vendors."

While other vendors work on the Web interfaces, ITL Metro will be installing its system during the first week of April. It then will undergo one month of acceptance testing. "In June, we get the final software version with additional features that we think are necessary before deploying it to real customers," Eisenberg said.

BroadSoft launched BroadWorks last week. The company also announced its win with ITL Metro and an alliance with Portal Software that will integrate BroadWorks with Portal's Infranet Software.

"If you compare it to the [Advanced Intelligent Network] market and look at traditional calling card and service creation platforms, they are monstrosities and are about $2 million to $3 million," Kuzma said. "If [BroadSoft] can price this thing like the media gateways, which are about one-fifth of that, they're going to come out a winner. If they're in that $2 million range, it's not going to win anything." BroadWorks starts at about $300,000.