Alianza offers the first hosted, fully-integrated IP-based platform for delivering Unified Communications Applications via software as a service (SaaS). Scott Bell, Chief Technical Office at Alianza, introduces Brad Baldwin to the value proposition and opportunity offered to service partners of Alianza

The following interview is a transcription of a vidcast published on RockyMountainVoices in October 2007.

Brad Baldwin: This is Brad from Rocky Mountain Voices and I'm here with Scott Bell, the CTO of Alianza. Welcome to the vidcast. Now, Alianza, is that a foreign word or a made up word?

Scott Bell: Alianza means "alliance" in Latin languages.

Brad Baldwin: What is it that Alianza does?

Scott Bell: We provide a hosted unified communications technology platform for broadband service providers.

Brad Baldwin: Explain a little further, tell me what that means.

Scott Bell: We enable broadband service providers to offer a unified communication platform where we host the platform and maintain and service the platform for the service providers. We enable them to white label their unified communication offering and customize their packages and plans for their end users.

Brad Baldwin: If you're doing an alliance with service providers, do they offload customers from a voice perspective to you?

Scott Bell: A lot of times the service provider already has the end user as a broadband customer and this is another product that they can offer to the end user to drive more revenue. So it enables a single player to be a double player. If they are already offering data, they can now offer data and telephony.

Brad Baldwin: So, it's kind of like Vonage for a residential or service provider?

Scott Bell: Correct. We are not Vonage, but we enable a broadband service provider to be a Vonage. And what's nice and different about this versus a Vonage is the broadband service provider controls that last mile and they can control the quality of service to some degree.

Brad Baldwin: So they have a relationship with the customer and you have all the service?

Scott Bell: Correct. We enable all of the IP telephony features. One of the nice things about that is that we enable them to go to market quickly. VoIP in 30 days or less. The speed to market is the biggest driver. The second one is that we find a lot of broadband service providers don't have the resources or the skill set in-house to just put together their unified communication platform. They can outsource that to us for that is our core competency. They can focus on their core competency of providing the broadband. Another huge feature is there are no capital expenditures. It's completely SaaS-based, or Software as a Service-based, so they don't need to purchase all of the expensive equipment and integrate everything together -- we have done that. When they select Alianza as the technology provider, we host everything and support everything. They provide the tier one, tier two customer support and have an escalation support through us for the more technically-challenging issues.

Brad Baldwin: I imagine this is a big opportunity for regional or location-based broadband providers versus the bigger, national providers. Is that your target?

Scott Bell: Our target is not the huge Comcast of the world, but more of the smaller, medium size broadband providers. Those that don't have the time or the capital to go to market and build their own platform. Regionally, our product is also bilingual, in Spanish and English. We've had a large focus in Mexico. In fact, that's how we got our start. We started as a service provider, similar to Vonage, but focusing on businesses in Mexico. Through that process we were able to build a lot of the tools and features that we needed as a service provider, the reporting. We've taken to take that platform, partitioned it, and use that same platform to enable multiple broadband service providers.

Brad Baldwin: Is there a size of player that your software can support?

Scott Bell: It is an infrastructure, so it's scalable. The target customer is probably anywhere from 1000 end users up to 200,000 end-users. One of the big things that would provide is that when broadband service providers try to build this product themselves, there's a lot of integration. Alianza doesn't just provide voice over IP, or the unified indication platform, but we provide the billing system and the session border controller. That's a technical term that's used for a lot of the security as well as the NAT reversal. When you do a hosted voice over IP, the most difficult thing is the NAT reversal -- to make the phones plug and play. We provide the session border controller, as well as the carrier provisioning, the voice over IP, the IP telephony features: such as forward, transfer, IVR, hold, and a lot of the media servers. The billing is the one that is not to be taken likely. We’ll provide real time billing and rate the calls in real time and bill them to the real-time user as well.

Brad Baldwin: So does that just roll into the existing broadband provider system? Do they take your billing system?

Scott Bell: A lot of broadband providers already have a billing system. They are currently invoicing their users for a product or service today. So what we will do is to rate all of the individual calls and real-time gather all of the monthly fees for telephony offering and send those to the service provider's billing system. We take all the heavy lifting on the telephony size and send it to the provider so they can use it on their system to send the end-user one invoice instead of multiple invoices.

Brad Baldwin: That sounds like one of those 30 day, get-to-business issues. You may be able to provide technology but the whole business infrastructure is another thing.

Scott Bell: We also provide end users with a web portal. They can be branded for the broadband service provider that the end user can actually go in and provision their lines and their features and functionality. As they do that real-time is when we can get those monthly fee transactions and send those real-time. The second Web portal would be for the broadband service providers themselves and their employees to login to the support as well as the product management. When I say product management I mean define their own calling plans, their own pricing, and what phone numbers, rate tables, things like that that they can set. It's not prepackaged Alianza plans, the broadband provider decides their own plans to offer.

Supporting the unified communications is not easy and requires a lot of custom tools. We have a help desk, which includes a ticket system and all of the tools that they need to use to support the end-user.

Brad Baldwin: So this is where the broadband provider really has a way of actually creating the problem tracking system?

Scott Bell: Correct. If the end user has problem such as their phone service isn't working, we provide the tools for the service provider to have everything at a glance and easily pinpoint something through graphics to find the exact problem.

Brad Baldwin: That's got to be a big benefit.

Scott Bell: It's part of the platform that we offer. The pricing is still the same, it's per extension. So we don't charge per employee or support rep to log in and use these features, that's part of the platform. You find out as a business what your core competency is. As the broadband service providers, that is your core competency. To add other things to that strategy is to spread yourself too thin. The best thing to do is to partner with somebody whose core competency is the voiceover IP/communications platform. In partnering with them that is what they focus on. Alianza's focus is on providing value in features and continually improving that platform, staying on the cutting edge of technology for the broadband service provider. They can then focus on their core competencies. We do have some resources to help the broadband service provider in making these decisions. Alianza.com/resources we have spreadsheet where you can plug in the costs of the servers and everything else included in offering your own telephony unified communication solution. You can find out of it makes sense to outsource compared to building in-house.

Brad Baldwin: As a business model, are you taking it percentage, sharing revenue -- how does this work?

Scott Bell: It's SaaS-baced which means “Software as a Service” and as the broadband service provider sells more end users then we actually bill per extension. As they need more extensions, or fewer extensions, we bill on a monthly basis for the extensions that they use so it's really on-demand software as a service.

Brad Baldwin: Anywhere in Mexico, anywhere in the US so far. Or anywhere the speak Spanish or English?

Scott Bell: We do have offices in Argentina and an office in Singapore -- targeting the Asia-Pacific region.

Brad Baldwin: I think this is a huge field. There are a lot of people interested in this, with cost-saving benefits that have obviously been proven.

Scott Bell: It is. There's a lot of demand, especially in the small to medium-sized service provider market. In Asia-Pacific, that area is booming and will be huge in the next few years. We are in early to hit the ground running there.

Brad Baldwin: Good luck and we look forward to coming back and hearing how your business model has worked out and adding more extensions, I guess. Thanks a lot for your time.

Scott Bell: Thank you.