A NEW APPROACH TO VoIP

A new national Internet telephony player is banking on its experience in the interconnect industry and its ties to value-added resellers to launch a new voice-over-IP service in the small and medium-sized business space.

Formally launched in January as One IP Voice, the new company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Farmstead Telephone Group, a distributor of Avaya equipment that has been in business since the mid-1980s.

Like many in the interconnect field, Farmstead has had its share of challenges in the post-bubble economy, said CEO Jean-Marc Stiegemeier, who took over in 2004. "The company was having some problems--revenue declines, losses--that were typical of the CPE and interconnect segments," he said.

Given its familiarity with the SMB market, however, and its ties to the reseller market, Farmstead decided to create One IP Voice as a national carrier-based provider of hosted VoIP services.

"We know there are a lot of pioneers in this hosted VoIP space, Stiegemeier said. "One of our major premises is that most of these companies built out softswitch platforms--they didn't understand the market or have a go-to-market strategy on how to deploy the service."

One IP Voice has such a strategy, selling its "voice over intelligent protocol" product as part of a bundled package targeting businesses with 200 lines or less--and most likely attracting those with 30 or less--through the same interconnect companies that SMBs are using today for IT support.

"A small business owner doesn't have the IT resources," Stiegemeier said. "They want dial-tone, they want features, they want to see an annualized cost reduction."

Interconnect companies are looking for new revenue streams and can benefit from the ongoing revenue of a hosted VoIP service, he added.

"For a small business, we provide an alternative to CPE acquisition, and we are focused on the legacy of all these resellers," Stiegemeier said. "We give [resellers] the glue to hold onto their embedded base of customers."

The service itself is a private-IP network based service that can be managed down to the desktop. One IP Voice uses national network partners Level 3 Communications and XO Communications to reach its customers.

The company already has signed national clients, and in March, it signed a national distribution deal with Iwatsu that made One IP voice the preferred hosted solution to its 250 independent business partners in 450 cities.