Breakthrough service enables high-quality multi-party video conferencing for any company

Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) March 2, 2010 — SimpleSignal, a leading service provider of hosted business telephone solutions for small and medium sized businesses, and Vidtel, an innovative video conferencing service provider, announced at Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas their distribution agreement to market Vidtel’s Hosted Multi-Point Video Conferencing Service to SimpleSignal’s hosted unified communications customers.

Polycom VVX 1500 With Vidtel-SimpleSignal Multi-Point Video Conference

Today, very few small-to-medium-sized enterprises have sufficient in-house resources for business-grade multi-point video conferencing. The video conferencing equipment required is too resource-intensive for all but the largest enterprises. SimpleSignal and Vidtel have partnered to deliver a hosted solution that even the smallest enterprises will find accessible. With this outsourced solution, SMBs have no need to acquire additional expensive infrastructure to initiate an ad hoc multi-party video conferencing call.

“SimpleSignal is well-recognized as a visionary service provider in the hosted voice market, often the first to roll out new applications and products to its SMB customers. We are excited to help fulfill SimpleSignal’s objective of bringing simplified unified communications to SMBs of all sizes with our multi-point video conferencing service,” said Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel.

Vidtel’s multi-point video conferencing service integrates with SimpleSignal’s BroadSoft® BroadWorks® application server with Vidtel’s video conferencing service and Polycom® VVXTM 1500 business media phones. The service enables three or more VVX 1500s to connect via a simple dial-in number for instant multi-way video conferencing.

“This new offer is nothing short of revolutionary. Now small to medium-sized businesses have no need for an extensive video conferencing system – a few people with a video phone can now easily dial a regular number to be connected. Previously, only point-to-point calling was realistic on these devices. This service also advances unified communications, seamlessly integrating video conferencing with our hosted VoIP service and amplifying the value of SimpleSignal’s hosted VoIP offer. We’re excited to be delivering this service with Vidtel, a cutting-edge video conferencing service provider,” said Dave Gilbert, SimpleSignal’s CEO.

SimpleSignal will begin offering the Multi-Point Video Conferencing service developed by Vidtel to customers beginning in Q2 2010.

About SimpleSignal
SimpleSignal is a facilities-based hosted PBX and Unified Communications service provider that also offers SIP Trunking services, advanced Voice Apps and Polycom IP Phone equipment. The company is one of the top BroadSoft switches in the U.S., providing IP Phone applications and services to thousands of satisfied customers throughout the U.S. and Canada, with a growing list of multi-office clients in many international locations. SimpleSignal dependably provisions off-net, which means that customers can bring their own bandwidth and still use the SimpleSignal Hosted PBX system without overhauling their entire IP infrastructure. SimpleSignal, Inc. is located at 34232 Pacific Coast Highway, Dana Point, CA 92629. Find us on the web at http://www.simplesignal.com. For sales, call 866-434-4404. Read our blog: http://www.simplesignal.com/blog/.

About Vidtel
Vidtel is an innovative video conferencing service provider. Our open, inter-enterprise video conferencing network service provides compatibility between a diverse set of business-grade video endpoints at enterprises worldwide. Vidtel enables even small and medium enterprises to experience the productivity of secure, high-quality video conferencing with partners, suppliers and customers around the world. Vidtel’s Video Conferencing Directory enables any video user to find another and to easily connect. Vidtel is located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA and at http://www.vidtel.com.

New Conference Deck Uses HD Audio Codec G.722 to Provide Stunning HD Audio Quality Integrated With SimpleSignal’s Unified Communications Service

Dana Point, CA (PRWEB) March 1, 2010 — SimpleSignal Inc., a leader in hosted business telephone solutions for small and medium sized businesses, today announced the addition of an HD Voice Conference Bridge solution to its growing list of hosted PBX calling features and voice apps. The company’s new conferencing service allows up to 100 callers to participate in unlimited HD audio conference calls for one flat rate of $29 per month, with volume discounts available.

“SimpleSignal’s goal is to continually make business communications easier and more accessible to our clients, and this affordable, high quality conference bridge is a linchpin to providing a comprehensive unified communications service,” said Dave Gilbert, CEO of SimpleSignal. “And with true HD voice quality our clients can enjoy conference calls that sound like you’re all in the same room, even when talking across the country.”

SimpleSignal keeps costs low by eliminating toll-free access to the conference bridge. With most business phone users nationwide on unlimited long distance calling plans, toll free service becomes a potentially redundant, unnecessary expense.

Although any user with a phone connection may call into SimpleSignal’s conference bridge, HD Audio sound is what really takes conference calling to another level. SimpleSignal uses the HD Audio Codec, G.722, which doubles the sample rate and the high and low frequency rate, with no noticeable latency, delivering a more natural conversation, with better clarity to discriminate between letters “S” and “F” or “P” and “T”. To take advantage of this technology users must be on the SimpleSignal network with a Polycom HD Voice IP phone or equivalent (legacy phone systems don’t support the G.722 codec). While this might limit the broad enjoyment of HD Audio conference calling at this point, the biggest beneficiaries of the HD quality will be SimpleSignal clients with multiple office locations that use a conference bridge as a regular part of their business process.

SimpleSignal’s HD Conference Bridge provides a full feature set including:

• Reservationless conference start, meaning your bridge is active and ready 24/7 without scheduling
• 100 participant capacity
• Entry/exit notification using chimes or recorded names
• Self muting
• Conference termination by the host (useful when you have back to back conference calls)
• Participant count
• Private roll call, meaning participants can hear a private playback of the recorded names still active on the call
• Multiple hosts
• Touchtone suppression
• Security lock which prevents new callers from joining the active call
• Keypad commands which easily and intuitively modify any of the settings during a call

SimpleSignal’s unlimited flat rate of $29 per month for up to 100 participants is extremely competitive for any size business, competing strongly with per minute plans that can cost businesses thousands of dollars per year with or without toll-free access.

About SimpleSignal
SimpleSignal is a Cloud-based (also known as Hosted PBX) Unified Communications service provider that also offers SIP Trunking services, advanced Voice Apps and Polycom IP Phone equipment. The company is one of the top BroadSoft switches in the U.S., providing IP Phone applications and services to thousands of satisfied customers throughout the U.S. and Canada, with a growing list of multi-office clients in many international locations. SimpleSignal dependably provisions off-net, which means that customers can bring their own bandwidth and still use the SimpleSignal Hosted PBX system without overhauling their entire IP infrastructure.  SimpleSignal, Inc. is located at 34232 Pacific Coast Highway, Dana Point, CA 92629. Find us on the web at http://www.simplesignal.com. For sales, call 866-434-4404. Read our blog: http://www.simplesignal.com/blog/.

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.

Unified Communications (UC) has come of age. We’ve been talking about the power of Unified Communications now for years but now business is experiencing first hand the value of having the new voice applications at work in their office. I was inspired by an article I read written by Khali Henderson in Phone+ Magazine this week that mentioned SimpleSignal. I’ve pulled out sections of her article and written this blog entry around them.

Businesses have begun to adopt a business strategy that includes voice applications at a stunning pace. Market projections show significant adoption over the next five years. Here’s some stats:

In its worldwide forecast published in June, Wainhouse Research found hosted Unified Communications will grow from $200 million today to $1 billion in 2011 and more than $5 billion in 2014. A competitive report, released by Radicati Group Inc. in May, similarly projected the market would reach nearly $5 billion by 2013 while its 2009 estimates are at $2.9 billion. North America Hosted Unified Communications revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 400 percent between 2009 and 2013. That is actually a very small number since most true hosted Unified Communications deployments started only last fall; thus the incredible revenue growth rate projection. Hosted Unified Communications seat growth for North America has a similar trajectory, climbing 273 percent over the forecast period.

Based on interviews with analysts and service providers, Unified Communications at a base level must include three elements — telephony, messaging and presence — integrated into a single interface. Beyond those core capabilities, consensus breaks down. The most common add-ons mentioned are mobility (i.e., fixed mobile convergence or FMC), collaboration and conferencing, and integration with business software applications, such as CRM.

The pitch for Unified Communications must necessarily go beyond the cost-savings discussion that has been fairly successful at convincing companies to migrate premises-based point solutions like IP PBXs and e-mail to hosted versions. Communicating the business benefits of Unified Communications is key.

While cost may not be the only reason for outsourcing hosted Unified Communications, there’s a great story to tell here, providers say, and it’s resonating well with companies of all sizes during the recession. Simply put, it just costs less money to install a hosted Unified Communications solution than buy a piece of equipment and put it in a closet in your office.

For instance, Microsoft’s OCS requires 12 servers by itself without tying it to a PBX. Adding other applications, such as Web conferencing and secure chat, only serves to drive the cost higher. The capital requirements are massive if you want to take this on, this doesn’t even address the soft costs of personnel to manage and maintain it. And the demands for knowledgeable IT staff don’t end once the system is deployed. Depending on the vendor of your Unified Communications platform, you do need a level of expertise to appropriately manage it, and that level of expertise increases as your enterprise size increases as well. Using SimpleSignal takes the worry away. Our highly trained technical staff manage all the complexities of running the Unified Communications platform. So outsourcing hosted Unified Communications can not only offer a company the benefits of the technology faster, it can offer the scalability required to meet growing —or shrinking—needs.

Another consideration is the cost of having a backup location in support of business continuity. SimpleSignal’s Unified Communications applications include all the accoutrements of a data center, including backup power, site redundancy and high-capacity bandwidth connectivity.

An additional “hidden” cost is keeping up with technology migration. New revs are coming faster and faster — not all of them are software, some are hardware — and those costs are unpredictable about when they are going to come and how much they are.

Wise companies are considering the reality that because technology is changing so fast, companies are increasingly worried about taking on the “capital risk” of a hardware solution and looking for ways to “future proof” their voice infrastructure.

The opex picture for hosted Unified Communications also looks pretty good when considering that just subscribing to point solutions like Web conferencing alone can be $60-plus per month per employee. Compare that to SimpleSignal’s fully loaded $59 per month per employee price tag for a hosted Unified Communications configuration including unlimited voice calls, conferencing, PBX, unified messaging and hosted Exchange server (email).

Money isn’t the only thing businesses need a lot of to implement Unified Communications on their own. Deploying a best-of-breed solution takes expertise in spades, and since it’s newer technology, that means research and time. A hosted Unified Communications provider has brought together myriad solutions, such as Microsoft OCS, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, integration with CRM like ACT! and Salesforce.com, Microsoft Exchange, Google Apps and more.

What SimpleSignal really does is solve the complexity issue. We’ve made it “simple” for a business to deploy Unified Communications. When you go with a hosted solution, it really is an on-demand type of relationship. We can have a full Unified Communications application in a four-week period instead of an 18-month period (for an on-premises solution).

This mind shift along with increased resource (people and cash) restraints due to the recession may be the reason that increasingly larger companies are moving to hosted Unified Communications.

This past weekend I met with the CEO of Broadsoft Mike Tessler. He shared with me that he knows of very large multi-location customers have started to dramatically change to the hosted model. This trend for hosted to go “upstream” is new in 2009. We’ve not seen that before. We were mainly focused on small and medium businesses (under 50 employees).  Now, the very large customer who, because of these economic times, are forced to focus on a smarter, more efficient, less capital-intensive way to get their voice and Internet services are considering SimpleSignal.

It seems that our biggest problem is awareness. Most businesses aren’t really aware, especially if they are smaller companies, that hosted Unified Communications is an option. Now is the time for our great company to come to the aid of our country.

In my daily discussions with small business and mid-sized business customers about phone systems I’m discovering a common theme.  In fact most conversations come down to just two main points:

• Saving money on their phone bill, and
• How Unified Communications can help their small to mid-sized business

The push-back I commonly hear is that the switch to IP communications is expensive and therefore takes too long to realize a return on investment (ROI). It can be compared to buying an electric car to save money on gas. How long does it take to recover the added cost of the new technology by using less gas? Too long.

That’s why a hosted Unified Communications (UC) solution makes sense. Businesses are finding it very cost effective to “rent” rather than buy their phone system. This goes beyond the leasing of the equipment. In a hosted Unified Communications environment there is nothing to maintain, upgrade or call the IT guy for. It is completely handled “in the cloud” out of a central server located in a secure hosted facility. (SimpleSignal has a national operations center (NOC) securely located in Denver, CO) CIO’s and IT managers are hearing the message of mitigating risk with managed Unified Communications deployments. The cost of the system is predictable because of a fixed per-user, per-month, unlimited usage plan. Most customers pay less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day per user!

In the past year I’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of firms that are evaluating hosted IP communications and SIP trunking solutions. One researcher notes that they’ve documented an  increase from 36% to 57% of the businesses they interviewed are using some form of IP communications. Why the shift? Growing businesses see Unified Communications phone systems as a key technology to support their collaboration. We hear about this everyday. According to our sales reps, more than half of the calls they receive are from people wanting to improve their collaboration with their co-workers through UC.

However, perception is different from reality. Creating real savings to persuade the CFO to sign off on a new phone system requires linking to business processes and applications and getting buy-in from business unit leaders. While savings from increased productivity and more effective collaboration are easy to see, they are often hard to count. Sometimes the value proposition can be strengthened by citing monthly cost savings, simplified management and a greater feature set.

In any case, the next few years will see a plethora of firms installing Unified Communications. We’ve only just begun to develop a whole new world of communications.

I read a disturbing quote the other day.

Perhaps the communications users of the future won’t care as much about voice at all. Younger users seem perfectly happy to Twitter, text, and instant message rather than making an old fashioned phone call.

Since I’ve invested so much of my life in striving to create a voice network, anything that makes it sound like people would need my services less is alarming. But the reality of current user behavior is that the majority of voice communication is still point to point–one person talking to one person.

However, today’s communication options include the ability for a person to carry on conversations with many people at once. Conferencing and collaborative desktop sharing are good examples. They make it possible for me to carry on two way communication with hundreds of people.  I can make my voice communications more effective by combining voice with other forms of communications. For example, I rarely just lob a call into a co-worker. By using IM I can know if the person I’m about to call is available so I don’t waste time leaving a voicemail if I don’t think that is going to be effective. I am not limited to one-on-one voice communication at all. You know about email but our communication system allows you to go beyond email and text a message to thousands of mobile users to keep it separate from their emails. Did you realize that Facebook and Twitter are the new email? It’s real time communication that people seem to prefer to an interruptive phone call.

Is voice communication going away? No, not as long as people like to talk. But it is fascinating to observe how communications are changing in 2009.

Ok, it’s a tough business climate out there. Our business has been impacted not only because businesses are spending less but many are shutting their doors and quitting altogether. It’s survival of the fittest and in this marketplace the weak will not survive.

But companies should look beyond only surviving the current crisis and see it an opportunity for innovation. One analyst I read said “While one trend is for companies to cut costs, reduce investments, monitor consumption through pricing and reign in cash flows to survive the crisis in the short term, another more important trend is to look at disruptive business models as an effective way to attract consumers.”

The term disruptive business model refers to those models that combine “existing technologies with new business models to create low cost products and services

Disruptive? SimpleSignal is about as disruptive as a leaf blower in a feather factory!

First we created a way to bring the world voice services over the internet cheaper and better. Now we are changing the very business models that we have come to accept as normal for the way we pay for telecommunication services.

How disruptive would it be if SimpleSignal could connect millions of VoIP users for free through peering with other IP networks like Skype to bypass the traditional land line networks. (Could it happen this year? Stay tuned)

What if Minutes were free and you just paid for the features and software apps you used and benefited from?

Developments like these could completely disrupt the 100 year old Telco business model.  What will the FCC do if it couldn’t tax telco’s any easier than the government could charge you for email? How will the Verizon’s and ATT’s survive without being able to charge you for each minute you are on the phone?

Yikes!

Maybe by promoting innovation we might stimulate economic growth and invent entirely new business models. This is America. Aren’t we supposed to love disrupting things?