The Power of Smoothstone

West Corporation, a leading provider of technology-driven voice and data solutions, today celebrates the 20th anniversary of its subsidiary, InterCall®, the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services provider.

InterCall launched in 1991 and provided services to facilitate conference calls for sales managers with their direct reports.  Since then, InterCall has grown into an industry leader, serving organizations in 179 countries.

InterCall has been on the cutting-edge of the way people and organizations conduct business from its inception and through a series of strategic acquisitions.  “InterCall has integrated communication tools into corporate business processes to such an extent and with such speed and transparency that people don’t even think about it any longer,” said Scott Etzler, InterCall President.

Highlights of the company throughout its history include the delivery of high-quality, reliable, easy-to-use services that include automated, self-service options.  Long-time customers also appreciate the company’s rigorous emphasis on customer intimacy, which is the focus of more than 1,500 operators, customer service representatives and meeting consultants.

“At West, our goal is to meet our clients’ business communications needs by providing best-in-class hosted and managed communications services,” said Todd Strubbe, president of West’s Unified Communications operating segment.  “As voice, data and video communications continue to evolve and converge, InterCall will be an even more integral component of West’s industry-leading unified communications services.”
For a timeline of InterCall industry milestones, please visit www.intercall.com.

About InterCall

InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation, is the largest service provider in the world specializing in conference communications. Founded in 1991, InterCall helps people and companies be more productive by providing advanced audio, event, Web and video conferencing solutions that are easy-to-use and save them time and money. Along with a team of over 500 Meeting Consultants, the company employs more than 1,500 operators, customer service representatives, call supervisors, accounting, marketing and IT professionals. InterCall’s strong U.S. presence, which includes four call centers and 26 sales offices, is bolstered by a global reach that extends to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. For more information, please visit www.intercall.com.

Mergers and acquisition activity in telecom this year is resulting in technology combinations that are causing a stir throughout the industry. A number of acquisitions so far, including West Corp. acquiring Smoothstone, have all turned heads, but also shine a light on the growth of VoIP.

TMC says this growth is based on several aspects:

• The ability to launch and manage a business phone system at a significantly reduced cost over traditional, on-premise PBX
• A convergence of service offerings aimed at providing Unified Communications solutions to the industry
• The addition to managed contact center capability to portfolios

To continue this growth, companies like Smoothstone are partnering with (or in their case courting) other communications companies to round out their portfolios. TMC wrote:

“Smoothstone views itself in the same tier as companies like AT&T and equipment providers such as Avaya and Cisco and sought to extend out its offerings by courting West Corp. The company recognized that to effectively compete for SMB VoIP business and enterprise share, a strong partner was needed.”

Cloud-based VoIP’s ascent to larger customers is gaining the attention of larger telecom firms, some of which are launching their own hosted services, and some of which are acquiring smaller providers, says Ed Gubbins of New Paradigm Research. His latest report, Hosted Business VoIP: UpMarket Opportunities, says that the small-business competitors are now climbing upmarket, following new spikes in demand from much larger, higher-paying customers. As they do, they’re colliding with competitive carriers and incumbents currently serving those customers, just as the bases for competition in this market are rapidly changing.

But the larger story here is the change is services necessary to accommodate those large to medium enterprises (LMEs).

“Medium-sized and large businesses aren’t driven as much by cost as they are by the functionality that hosted VoIP provides, some of which, as it turns out, is especially well-suited to their unique needs,” writes Gubbins in a blog post on the blog Plumvoice.com. Cloud-based solutions are particularly adept at tying together the kinds of distributed workforces that define larger companies. They allow employees at satellite offices, home offices and those with an array of disparate mobile devices to tap into the same uniform communications platform. And they are useful in efficiently and intelligently routing calls to those with the proper skills or expertise.”

As a result, these larger customers are gaining the attention of larger firms who are working on realigning their businesses to further accommodate them. For example, Gubbins points out that Smoothstone was acquired by West Corp. this year. Smoothstone exclusively pursues customers with more than 200 seats, says the customers it acquired over the last year have averaged 750 seats and 18 locations and spent an average of nearly $25,000 per month on its services.

Churn rates are closely watched to judge the health of the wireless service providers today. Yet the same focus on churn does not exist in the enterprise IT service provider world. There are no industry-wide churn rates published. In a “service” industry, why aren’t we measuring the most important metric – customer satisfaction – as illustrated by customer churn rates. Customers vote with their feet, and if their feet are on the move, that’s not a good thing for the business model of any IT service provider – or channel partners who are working with that provider.

IT service providers should be willing to share their customer retention rates with customers and prospects, and also with industry analysts and financial investors. Yes, it can help them sell, but it also helps reassure a prospective decision maker that the channel partner’s IT service provider is not only capable of, but extremely proficient at, providing superior service levels.

But that is the exception, not the norm, for IT service providers. And that brings up another interesting question for our industry and the channel partners who work in it: How on earth can you recommend an IT service provider if you have no idea what their level of customer satisfaction is?

If you are falling in love with all the bells and whistles, you’ve fallen in love with the skeleton of the business. The heart, blood and soul of the business is in the service levels, not in the technology. Without service, all you have is a bag of bones – and as a channel partner you’ll be left holding that bag if the provider’s service isn’t up to snuff.

James Whitemore is executive vice president of Smoothstone IP Communications, a cloud communications provider for enterprises. He can be reached at jwhitemore@smoothstone.com.

The SMB market has for a long time been the focus of VoIP providers because of the ease of install and desire for SMBs to save money. But a focus on small to medium businesses doesn’t adequately prepare VoIP providers to handle the demands of larger companies, says James Whitemore of Smoothstone, who is focused on providing VoIP and other communication services to the large enterprise market.

Whitemore told FierceTelecom’s Samantha Bookman, “Most have built their market presence primarily focused on the SMB marketplace or in the case of NGT also on wholesale. Smoothstone’s focus is very much on the enterprise space. Typically, you’ll see a hosted or cloud customer averaging in the $500 to maybe $5000 a month ARPU … At Smoothstone we’re averaging around $35,000 a month with deals in the $100,000 to $200,000 a month in earned revenue being quite normal. The average sized customer that we acquire is far different from most hosted providers, and that’s a big factor in the volume of seats and our market share.”

The key for Smoothstone has been its acquisition by West Corp.’s InterCall division, which has integrated Smoothstone’s hosted communications services with its collaboration offerings.

“It became very clear to us that to reach the next stage we would need a significant partner, to keep that enterprise focus,” Whitemore told FierceTelecom. “We essentially are asking (a potential) customer to sign with Smoothstone versus signing with one of those industry giants. Just the extra effort we have to go through to close a sale based on the size and the … nature of the company has been, it’s been difficult, it’s been challenging. … (what) we’ve been looking for is a partner who had global scale… and West Corp. is a $2.5 billion, 37,000 employee company that ranks up there with the big guys.”

Smoothstone has now set up a direct peer with Google, allowing for a Smoothstone customer to have direct, private connectivity to Google apps through the MAXXIS application aware network. Using MAXXIS network tools, customers can also determine the Quality of Service (QoS) settings for the transit of data to Google.

The peering connections come from Smoothstone’s data centers in Atlanta and San Jose. Traffic to and from Google Apps, the Google Search engine and other Google affiliates will transit directly without having to cross into the public cloud. This means a more secure, fast and reliable connection for business-related applications.

TMC’s John Lahtinen was able to sit down with InterCall at last month’s Channel Partners Conference in Chicago. At the conference, InterCall recently announced that the new Pay Per Minute and license pricing models for Adobe Connect in North America are now available through channel partners.

West Corporation, the parent company of InterCall, has been very active in looking to expand its presence in the unified communications space. In April, West added to its expanding UC business, which includes InterCall, by announcing the acquisition of Smoothstone, a provider of cloud-based communications solutions for the enterprise.

“Interest is very high right now,” said Robert Wise, Executive Vice President for Unified Communications Services at InterCall. “We are making acquisitions, investing in streaming technology, and are in the process of creating a full CaaS solution.”

TMC reports that InterCall recently worked with Microsoft to develop a solution that integrates its Reservationless–Plus audio conferencing platform with Microsoft Lync Online. InterCall, a Microsoft Silver Certified Partner and national systems integrator (NSI), is one of only three providers worldwide to offer integrated audio conferencing with Lync.

This past weekend was a busy one for Smoothstone employees!

Smoothstone was proud to put together a committed team for the 2011 Bike to Beat Cancer, a cancer awareness and fund-raising event.  Team members Robert Baggatts, Brad Estes, Kevin McMahon, Joshua Mosher and Chuck Piazza were pleased to welcome a sixth “honorary Smoothstone” member, Robert Theuerkauf of Middleton Reutlinger into their ranks.  Together team Smoothstone cycled over 550 miles, with most covering the entire 105 mile course, against the wind, rain and numerous Kentucky hills to achieve a total fundraising amount of approximately $5,400.

We also had 30 employees and friends compete in Saturday’s Big Brown Truck Pull for Special Olympics, a fun event held at 4th Street Live where teams of 15 pull a loaded UPS 18-wheeler 12 feet!   Our two teams raised over $3,500 for the Special Olympics KY, which will send 32 kids to the State Summer Games.  The Smoothstone Power Pullers Gals defended their title as reigning champion by coming in 1st in the Women’s Division with a pull of 5.13 seconds. The Smoothstone Power Pullers Guys came in 3rd place at 4.37 seconds. Check out our demo strategy that was shown at a pep rally before the event.

Special thanks to all our employees who participated in this weekend’s events by either pulling, riding, donating or supporting!

While the Smoothstone Community Outreach Team normally participates in one charity event or fundraiser a month, we’re taking on three events this weekend. On Saturday,  Smoothstone will be sending more than 40 volunteers to three different fundraisers in order to raise money for local charities. Below are a description of each, plus a link to learn more and donate.

Bike to Beat Cancer 2011

For 2011, The Norton Cancer Institute in Louisville, Ky., has partnered with The Bike to Beat Cancer to coordinate this year’s event to raise funds toward cancer outreach, prevention and education as well as cancer treatments, including brain, breast and pediatric cancer. The 2011 Bike to Beat Cancer will take place September 24th and Smoothstone is very excited to be participating in the event.

Big Brown Truck Pull

Smoothstone’s women’s team won this competition last year, and we’ll be defending our title this Saturday. The competition consists of 14 people pulling an entire loaded UPS 18-wheeler truck 12 feet in the shortest time. There are also awards for the top fundraisers, team with the most team spirit and the best team T-shirts. Donations raised by each of the teams goes to benefit the Special Olympics of Kentucky.

Habitat for Humanity

Smoothstone’s most common charitable event is Habitat for Humanity of Metro Louisville. This weekend, we’ll be sending a team of volunteers to perform various tasks on a house in an underprivileged part of our city.

Gartner estimates the cloud market will reach $150 billion by 2013, and the financial services industry is one of the main industries reaping the benefits of leveraging the cloud for communications purposes. Among the business reasons for this movement to cloud-based communications are:

• The need for collaboration among the increasing number of remote and mobile workers;
• The addition of new branches;
• A desire to improve customer service; and
• The need to improve operational excellence while reducing technology equipment and management costs.

But what does that really mean for the financial industry, specifically credit unions? Do you now need to abandon your current technology investment and move it to the cloud?

Smoothstone’s James Whitemore gives some advice on the migration to the cloud for credit unions in this article on creditunionmagazine.com.