For the past two years, the SimpleSignal team in the Denver office has teamed up with ADVODA, one of our valued channel partners, to make an impact in their local community.

This year – Michael Sterl, Aric Applefield, Jeff Sexton and Scott Davidson showed their philanthropic side once more and helped ADVODA and other partners fill a military truck with toys for the Toys for Tots campaign. This year, through donations from customers and partners, ADVODA gave six teams of participants $700 per team to spend on toys for the campaign. Using discount cards and coupons, team members competed to get the most out of their spending. One team even had a Target employee on their team – giving them a 10% discount at Target!

“We have been supporting the Toys for Tots program in Colorado for seven years,” said Ron Dunworth, Managing Partner of ADVODA. “Thanks to the SimpleSignal team and their generous contribution, we were able to fill the back of a very large military truck with toys and games for the children of Colorado.”

Some team members chipped in at the last minute to get even more toys. The pizza delivery employee that brought food to the team members even donated $17 for the purchase of toys. At the end of the evening, members of the Marine Corps and ADVODA Toys for Tots partners helped load up the back of the truck with over $5,000 worth of gifts.

Way to go, SimpleSignal and ADVODA!

View from SalesForce.com Offices

We recently had the amazing opportunity to visit the offices of SalesForce.com in San Francisco. Their offices and staff are certainly impressive to say the least, but what is most impressive is they are once again leading the way, thinking about the Cloud and how it impacts the enterprise. Their next big focus? Collaboration.

Cloud technology enables collaboration on a new level. It’s easier and faster than ever before, and as businesses are evolving and utilizing remote workforces, collaboration is more important than ever.

It’s not just about Unified Communications (UC) anymore, it’s Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C). And that last “C” is really important. Businesses who offer Cloud-based services, like SalesForce.com and SimpleSignal, are really “in tune” with the idea of collaboration. They are striving to develop better collaboration tools and ways to stay connected, and it’s a very exciting movement to be part of.

Poster inside SalesForce.com Office

Some examples of collaboration tools are:

• Video conferencing
• Instant messaging
• Wikis
• Internet Relay Chat
• And many more…

Have any questions about UC&C and how it works for businesses? Visit our booth at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo for both collaboration and SalesForce.com CRM integration demos. You’ll be blown away.

This article was front page news at VON.com.  This is a major breakthrough for the entire VoIP industry!

Philadelphia, PA and Dana Point, CA – October 22, 2009 – Alteva, North America’s largest enterprise hosted VoIP provider, and SimpleSignal, a facilities-based complete network provider of business VoIP, today announced the successful completion of an IP peering relationship that will integrate disparate VoIP Service Providers to improve voice and video communications and allow advanced feature integration.

Currently, most calls are placed through the traditional PSTN controlled by legacy carriers, which defeats many of the current quality improvements available with High Definition (HD) IP communications. When VoIP service providers peer with each other, users on either network can connect directly over IP and bypass the PSTN. This allows the user to experience all the quality and features available through HD IP voice and video communications in a cross-platform call. The technology being used is an innovative and new approach of “fabric-based peering,” in which carriers can easily and reliably route communications based traffic between customers or end users regardless of who they use for their services.

Following this year’s CTO Summit, held at the VON Conference & Expo in Miami Beach, Florida, Alteva and SimpleSignal became the first VoIP Service Providers to take the dramatic step towards improving video communications and HD voice communications.

“The roadblock to enhanced communications services continues to be the limitations of the PSTN networks that interconnect all carriers,” said Mark Marquez, VP of Technology at Alteva. “Alteva believes that ‘a high tide raises all ships’. By working with SimpleSignal, we are able to provide end-to-end IP-based communications that allow for enhanced video conversations, as well as high-definition voice. We hope this will encourage other carriers to follow suit.”

“The SimpleSignal and Alteva alliance proves that HD voice and exceptional video quality can happen completely outside of the traditional PSTN,” said Ujjval Karihaloo, VP of Engineering at SimpleSignal. “By removing the barrier of the PSTN and peering with other service providers, IP communications can be all that it was created to be. Alteva and SimpleSignal users can now talk to each other using HD voice technology without any per minute charges.”

Some of the benefits of a nationwide IP peering fabric could include: nationwide HD-to-HD calling between different service providers, the ability to pass video from one carrier to another, and more overall cost-effective peering relationships for service providers and their customers.

“The recent growth in SIP trunking will quickly advance new IP-based communication applications like video conferencing,” said Seamus Hourihan, executive vice president of marketing and product management for Acme Packet. “Acme Packet’s Net-Net Session Border Controllers provide the foundation for service providers like Alteva and SimpleSignal to deliver trusted, first-class communications and offer new business tools to more effectively meet the needs of their enterprise customers.”

Alteva and SimpleSignal will demonstrate their peering relationship at Acme Packet’s Interconnect 2009 conference (November 8-11th) in Miami, Florida. The demonstration will include HD voice and video communication between Alteva and SimpleSignal, two of the leading hosted VoIP carriers in North America.

We’ve often said we have built our business by recruiting great channel partners. Now we’re putting all the stuff they need to know about how to build a great business on SimpleSignal in one place. Introducing the SimpleSignal online Partner Portal.

This micro site was built exclusively for our partners.  By logging into this portal a SimpleSignal partner can see their history of commissions paid, their customers and payment history, insider tips about new products, our training webinar schedule, our latest spiffs, quote tools and supporting documents, access to our sales resource library, FAQ’s about working with simplesignal, industry trends and news, a winners circle that lists the top three producing agents for the month, a calendar of events and more. It is a one stop resource page that contains all the information you need to manage your customers and familiarize yourself with SimpleSignals products and services.

I’m looking forward to showing you around the site. Contact me at dave@simplesignal for a personal tour or just check it out yourself by contacting Marya@simplesignal.com or call 949-777-5149 and get your login.