San Diego-based communications services provider Telcentris today announced its white label VoIP solution—an end-to-end managed wholesale VoIP enablement platform designed to provide interconnects, ILECs, CLECs, ITSPs, and entrepreneurs a plug-and-play environment that will let them set up a VoIP company in a matter of weeks.
“The demand for VoIP continues to grow as consumers and businesses shift from traditional telephony to Internet-based phone services due to cost and feature considerations,” said Bryan Hertz, CEO of Telcentris, in a statement. “Our white label solution equips customers with the portfolio of a full-fledged VoIP provider, but none of the expensive infrastructure or maintenance cost requirements.”
Enterprise VoIPplanet spoke about the announcement with Telcentris’ sales director, Tad Nikolich, in an exclusive briefing.
“This is for companies that want to provide hosted PBX, SIP trunking, or other types of services but don’t have the money to buy a big softswitch, or the time to create a proprietary platform,” he said. “This is a be-your-own-VoIP-company-in-a-box—type solution.”
According to Nikolich, the white label services run on top of Telcentris’ existing, built-from-the-ground-up communications services platform, which allows the company to sell hosted PBX and SIP trunking services around the world—as well as carrier services such as termination, origination, DIDs, SMS services, and the like.
“We built a platform from the ground up, several years ago, and now it powers lots of different products and services that we offer,” Nikolich explained. It allows Telcentris to sell hosted PBX and SIP trunking services around the world—as well as carrier services such as termination, origination, DIDs, SMS services, and the like.”The platform competes with BroadSoft, Sylantro, and some of the other well-known carrier softswitches out there,” Nikolich said. It now powers the white label program as well.
“Customers pay a nominal setup fee and we set them up into our system,” Nikolich said. “We help them create the products and services they want to sell—whether it’s hosted PBX to businesses, SIP trunks or trunk replacements for existing PBXs, SMS, callback—a lot of different things.”
Setup time varies with the experience level of the customer.
“If it’s someone that’s very familiar with phone systems and hosted systems and fairly IT savvy, we can get ’em going in a week,” Nikolich said. “But two to four weeks is a very reasonable time for us to turn up a [typical] customer.”
Once set up, customers get three days of training, which is recorded so they can review it. The get access to Telcentris’ switch, to an online portal they can go into to create accounts, and to the billing platform .
“Once we have created their products, they can bring on subscribers, add hosted seats, SIP trunks, SMS. There’s a DID manager so they can manage the phone numbers they get from us,” Nikolich told VoIPplanet. “Then all the carrier services such as toll free numbers, DIDs, termination, SMS, wholesale services, call-back—all those carrier services. Basically, they get the entire back end of our system,” Nikolich said.
The type of company that this seems to work best for is interconnects (phone system providers), according to Nikolich.
“These phone system providers have noticed over the last few years that margins going down—in part because people are buying hosted services—and they need to stay competitive, he said.
One way is by selling hosted PBX and carrier services under their own label. For example, when interconnects sell a phone system, their customer then needs phone lines.
“In the past, they would partner with another company to provide those lines,” Nikolich explained. “Now, instead of just giving that business away, they can get the SIP trunks from us, mark them up, put them on their invoices, and make healthy margins and residual income.”
Telcentris also expects CLECs, Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) and independent entrepreneurs will become white label customers, in addition to interconnects.
The setup fee for white label platform customers is $5,000, and this includes the training and product creation. Monthly fees are based on usage and the specific services customers are buying.
“Instead of investing a million or two and all that time into creating your [company], for a few thousand dollars, you can have it all, and get it going in a matter of weeks,” Nikolich summed up.
