With the release of Televate, its cloud-based telephony system, InPhonex is seeking Canadian partners to help deliver the solution and is offering them “significant revenue opportunities,” its chief marketing officer, Matt Bramson said.
InPhonex’s go-to-market is approximately 85 per cent channel and 15 per cent direct, Bramson said. With a network of roughly 3,500 channel partners, including about 100 in Canada, the company currently serves over a quarter million end-users with its solutions, and is headquartered in Miami.
With the launch of Televate Bramson said the company is looking for more channel partners.
“This is the first time we’ve offered a mature, complete product on our own without having our customer bring a significant element such as a device or application to the solution,” Bramson said. “This offering was made possible with our strategic partnership Ringio, whose cloud-based rich-calling application has been fully integrated into our platform. What we were providing up until Televate were primarily platform services and the ability to add a telephony service to a solution.”
The sweet spot for Televate are businesses in the four to 20-seat range, although the solution can scale up to more users, Bramson said. The hosted solution combines telephony with interactive voice response and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to help small and mid-sizes businesses “appear larger than they actually are,” he added.
While InPhonex isn’t the first vendor to offer hosted telephony solutions, one of the main differentiators with its Televate solution is that it provides content-rich screen pops that display call and customer history to the user.“Televate works whether the user is at their desk or outside of the office” Bramson said. “It generates a rich screen pop to let the user know who’s calling and also displays a brief record of who he or she called last and what they spoke about. It’s the same user interface whether you’re at your desktop (Mac or PC), or on your smartphone.”
There’s also a CRM component built into Televate so users can gain more information about the caller. When users set up their Televate account, they’re able to sync their contacts to create a single customer database whether it’s through Microsoft Outlook, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), LinkedIn or Facebook, Bramson said. The contact information is used for the screen pops and for shared call histories, he added.
Pricing for Televate is on a monthly basis and sells for $30 per seat. There are no setup fees or contracts, so partners make their revenues with an upfront bounty and monthly recurring revenues after that, Bramson said.
“Our offer to the channel is that we’ll pay an upfront bounty of three times the monthly revenue of whatever the customer’s paying plus five per cent of the monthly recurring revenue for 24 months,” Bramson said.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
