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Alteva (News - Alert) is North America’s largest provider of enterprise hosted VoIP and has become the pioneer for showcasing the high quality and reliability of hosted VoIP solutions. Alteva provides businesses with “Communication as a Service” that requires minimal installation and configuration while eliminating monthly phone system maintenance charges and reducing overall telephony costs. With a sophisticated open standards infrastructure, Alteva enables businesses to easily integrate existing business applications. Rather than building their processes around the limitations of their phone system, Alteva’s customers build their phone systems around their ideal processes. Based in Philadelphia, Alteva provides Internet access, telephone system and service to growth-oriented businesses in 48 states and 9 countries.

 

I took the opportunity to correspond with Alteva’s CEO, William Bumbernick about the company’s mission as well as what they are doing in the HD Voice space with partner Polycom (News - Alert).

 

WB: Alteva’s mission is to deliver the best enterprise IP telephony solution in the world. We will do this by providing the most reliable network, the most responsive and proactive customer service, the best trained sales force and offer the best value to customers in our industry.

 

WB: Whether you are ready for a total telephone system or need to be integrated with your existing PBX (News - Alert), Alteva offer solutions completely scalable from a small to midsized business to the higher demands of the larger enterprises.

 

Alteva’s ideal customer is a multi-location enterprise corporation in need of a new phone system. This ideal client will have 50–5,000 employees over multiple locations and spend $3,000 or more per month in combined telecommunications costs. Particularly, we’ve found a niche in the broker/dealer, government, retail chain, health care and publishing industries.

 

WB: Our customers are generally looking for low upfront costs when buying a new phone system. They want to make sure they have the best sounding call every time they make a phone call and a highly redundant phone system without any single points of failure.

 

Alteva customers are looking for the same reliability of their traditional system but with enhanced features such as unified communications, CRM integration, fixed mobile convergence, and call recording. When call clarity in an enterprise level account is the most pressing concern, we turn to Polycom’s HD phones to deliver the quality that the customer desires.

 

WB: Yes, all of Alteva’s employees are using HD Voice.

 

WB: Today’s businesses need to make sure that efficiency and time management are treated as a priority. By utilizing HD phones with wideband technology, we are able to offer crystal clear, natural voice communications to our customers. The phones deliver twice the clarity of ordinary phone calls for life-like, vibrant conversations which enables more natural conversations that significantly boost recognition and enhance productivity. You are able to hear every word without having to repeat yourself which often results in misunderstandings and frustrated callers.

 

WB: We find that Polycom’s SoundPoint® IP501, IP 601, IP430 are the most widely sold phones, but the Polycom’s HD Voice™ SoundPoint® IP550 and IP 650 are the most widely requested due to unmatched call clarity of HD voice.

 

WB: Yes, due to the improved call clarity, we are currently developing advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Voice Recognition solutions around this wide-band technology.

 

WB: While other IP phone service providers simply fall short on quality and reliability, our network was built specifically for the enterprise business phone service, using live, real-time digital voice that is offered at an affordable rate. By teaming with Polycom’s portfolio of HD voice enabled phones, Alteva is able to offer a hosted solution that surpasses call clarity standards of traditional telecom (TDM) and is able to deliver more innovation to businesses than premise-based systems, offering superior voice quality and enhanced productivity to businesses of any size.

 

WB: In general, the hosted VoIP market has seen an increase in growth during this time of a downward economy. IP phone service provides an affordable, easy-to-use, low maintenance solution that people are starting to see as an attractive option in this slower economy. Hosted and “as a Service” models become more appealing when budgets are being scrutinized. The core benefits of hosted solutions are lower monthly and upfront telecom expenses. These core benefits drive customers to this solution rather than to competing solutions in a downward economy.