Ifbyphone offers carriers value-add services via SIP trunking

Ifbyphone is announcing this week that it is offering all of its Phone 2.0/mashup style value-added services as white label offerings via SIP trunking, enabling softswitch-equipped carriers to sell phone automation services on top of their VoIP/SIP offerings.

"As transport prices continue to collapse, CLECs and regional telcos and hosted providers need applications to add value," Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro said. "The real power of SIP is a signaling protocol to allow a telephony company to gain access to applications. We're making our applications available to anyone, any carrier to use those applications in their customer base, just as someone can [incorporate] a web service in a web page."

Carriers using softswitches can add Ifbyphone features like full-function IVR, Call Queuing, Call Tracking and "Find Me" Call Forwarding, and complete applications such as Voice Broadcasting, Store Locator, and Lead Distributor without having to do the capital outlays for building their own applications.

The key in implementing the service is leveraging SIP trunking, allowing carriers to connect to Ifbyphone and route calls to what the company is calling "Smart ports" within the Ifbyphone platform, while also retaining origination and termination. Small to medium-sized carriers can access the features and services on a pay-as-you-go model, rather than investing significant dollars in capital expenditures and programming.

Shapiro outlined three business scenarios for implementing the services, with a $10,000 one-time setup fee for setting up the SIP trunk attached to all of them. For a limited number of customers needing IVR-style features, a carrier could route calls to Ifbyphone and simply get charged back on a per-minute basis for usage of those features. Larger usage would necessitate the rental of dedicated applications ports, with some capability to burst/oversubscribe on the first month to balance usage correctly -- but you have to pay for what you use. Finally, Ifbyphone is willing to work out a partnering relationship with a larger CLEC of sufficient size with a revenue share model.

While voice is the current focus, Sharpiro said any SIP applications could be delivered via the same model. "We're the first SIP applications warehouse on the net," he remarked.

Ifbyphone is certainly going through boom times with its current business. The company has reportedly growing at a rate of 10 to 15 percent per month over the last 20 months, with the first quarter of 2009 showing 50 percent growth over Q4 2008.