After four months at Smoothstone I've become very accustomed to answering the question, what does Smoothstone do?
In essence we are a provider of unified IP communications services to mid-sized enterprises. We deliver Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), IP trunking, unified threat management, MPLS networking, contact center solutions, messaging and advanced collaboration tools as a unified suite of managed services and cloud based applications. Our scalable, on-demand applications & services can be easily integrated with a customer's existing network and telecommunications infrastructure, operational processes and employee activities, enabling a customer to migrate to unified IP communications as their business requirements dictate.
The way I sum it up - we help our customers do much more than just voice over IP, we help them work over IP.
A little history on Smoothstone always helps people understand who we are and what we do.... The company is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky and was founded by a team of IP technology leaders with a singular vision: to build a scalable, on-demand, hosted IP communications platform. And they had lofty goals for this platform - it must deliver a complete package of enterprise communications to businesses, and fully integrate those communications capabilities into existing business processes. In short, the purpose of this platform was to deliver the benefits of converged networks and IP communications (previously only available to the Fortune 500) to mid-size enterprises. That idea took root with the launch of Teledvance Communications in 2000, which was later renamed Smoothstone IP Communications. Today, this privately-held firm has grown to more than 120 employees.
The founders of Smoothstone brought with them some very unique - and synergistic - talents. Jeff Wellemeyer, President, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, who had launched many technical products into the marketplace, developed the concept behind the centralized delivery of IP communications services. Shelly Godfrey, Chief Operations Officer, who has been in the high-tech communications, data and financial transaction processing business for nearly 17 years, is responsible for the company's product deployment, implementation and back end operational support systems. Paul Borgman, CEO, with over 20 years experience in managing high growth enterprises, and a strong background in finance, sales and marketing, provides the overall business leadership to the firm.
Their management philosophy - both then and now - is simple:
- Carefully manage growth to ensure product quality
- Deliver services that exceed client's expectations
- Focus on attracting and retaining outstanding people
This philosophy has helped us to grow Smoothstone from a small regional network, providing services to two cities in 2000, into a nationwide provider delivering local dial tone to over 8,000 local calling areas.
Our goal was, and still is, to unleash the promise of IP networking, and drive it into every form of enterprise communications, taking advantage of IP's inherent scalability, control, integration and utility as a platform for innovation and business acceleration. And we set our sights on the mid-sized enterprise, with hundreds/thousands of employees in multiple geographic locations, firm in our belief that these customers face daunting challenges and complexities if they try to migrate to an IP communications platform themselves.
Since 2000, Smoothstone has continuously pushed the boundaries of what's possible with unified IP communications, building an impressive track-record of industry firsts. Some of these include:
2000 - First converged voice and data managed service delivered over an MPLS network
2000 - First to market with hosted fax to desktop service
2002 - First to market with E911 service
2005- First to market with IP trunking for Cisco's Call Manager
2006 - First carrier to provide converged metro Ethernet service over TDM
We intend to stay at the forefront of this fast changing IP communications industry, I'll share more of where we are heading in future posts....
James Whitemore
