As the stock market rollercoaster continues its ride, oil prices are falling and I am now filling up at less than $1.50 per gallon. If I had told you four months ago that we would be paying less than $2 per gallon for gas, you would have thought I was crazy. During the days of $4.25 per gallon gasoline, every newspaper, news station, Internet blog and Internet news site had multiple stories on not only the oil crisis, but also on heavy conservation initiatives (the “green” movement). Instead of the automobile industry talking about government bailouts, they were competing to see who could be first to build the greenest machine on the planet.

So where have all of the environmental initiatives gone? Sure you see one every now and again, but the mainstream media has, for the most part, abandoned the groups that care about the long-term health and survival of our planet. The stories have changed and mostly revolve around the economies of our time. It is important to recognize that the economy is — when put into perspective — a short term issue. It will rebound; people will start spending again, unemployment will drop, interest rates will rise, etc. After the rebound, where will the environment be? Some experts argue that we are damaging Earth exponentially each year, while others think humans are arrogant to believe our species could affect such change on a planetary level.

So what should we do, if anything? Many times in business I receive advice from experts that seems to come from opposite ends of the spectrum. When posed with such information, I of course look at all of the data available and try to choose a wise position. But occasionally the information doesn’t point to a clear direction. At these times, I look back and remember the advice my grandmother would have given me in not so many and not so eloquent words. Pearl, as her friends appropriately called her, was full of pearls of wisdom. She had grown up during the depression in a dire community outside of Atlanta. Perhaps because of this, she had an amazing ability to peel away all of the gibberish around a situation and sum it up in five or six words that cut straight to the heart of the matter. Her vision was so clear and so on target, most of the time I couldn’t help but wonder, “How could I have missed that?” Her clarity greatly simplified decision making.

In regards to the environment, when I am torn between whether I should follow the advice of the scientists that paint a doomsday scenario or the ones that believe there is nothing that we can do to change the course of the planet, I can almost hear Pearl saying, “It’s better to be safe than sorry!”.

We have nothing to lose and everything to gain if we move towards the side of conservation and environmentalism. If we believe in the scientists who think our course is unalterable and they are wrong, we have everything to lose.

Businesses, as a whole, can affect the environment with exponential results when compared to the efforts of individuals. When a company chooses to become green and take sincere initiatives to improve the world in which we live, they are making an investment in future generations of employees and customers. It always interests me how much employers talk about how they care for their employees and their employees’ families, but when I ask what specific green initiatives they have undertaken in the past year, they usually can’t offer up much. So how is it that employers care so much about their employees but cannot commit to the future health and wellbeing of their employees, their children, and the generations to come by investing something into cleaning up our environment? This investment doesn’t need to involve capital. It could be coordinating a company sponsored community cleanup, putting recycle bins next to the copier, implementing a paper reduction initiative, putting motion sensors on the lights of infrequently used rooms or any number of very simple and low cost ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Here at Alteva we not only embrace initiatives in our day-to-day operations, we also offer a product that is truly green. When a customer chooses a Hosted VoIP provider for service over a premise-based solution, they contribute to an overall reduction in resources (and costs) of power and cooling by up to 84 percent. These energy reductions also imply a reduction in carbon dioxide gas emissions produced as a byproduct of generating electricity. Based on our subscriber base and the reduction of premise-based equipment, we estimate Alteva reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 900,000 pounds per year. This is equivalent to the emissions generated in 64 average homes annually.

Businesses have the opportunity and responsibility to be good stewards of the environment. Please encourage the company where you work and the business leaders with whom you work to accept the responsibility to help protect the world our children and our children’s children will inherit from us.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.

The holidays are here and what better time to talk telecom than after a full plate of holiday joy? Seriously though, the holidays are a time for visiting with family and friends, as well a time to evaluate this past year’s success (or lack of) in the telecom space. Whether it is increasing concern over Qwest’s growing $1.27 billion in convertible debt or reports that the wireless carriers are flourishing even in this troubled economy, with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Metro PCS in the U.S. and Rogers Wireless in Canada all reporting double-digit revenue growth in the third quarter, it is abundantly clear that the innovators will prosper while the “old school” of telecom will be left in the classroom as a boring history lesson.

We are seeing it across the board: Companies that are innovating during this time of economic turmoil are both growing and prospering. The reason? Business customers are looking for ways to streamline their businesses.

Real World Scenario

Alteva, a hosted VoIP provider, recently acquired a customer who was on a competitor’s hosted IP-PBX platform. The customer’s executive team was tasked with strategic reductions in costs to accommodate a corresponding loss in revenues. More specifically, their goal was to find ways to reduce their costs without sacrificing service. Their annual spend with our competitor was just over $280,000. One of their strategies for cost reductions was to find possible ways to integrate systems and enhance reporting capabilities to uncover efficiencies and subsequently reduce costs. They went to their previous carrier and asked for the capability to integrate their existing CRM and workflow applications with the hosted telecom platform. The answer was a resounding “no!” The carrier sited security and stability concerns and politely let the customer know that they didn’t offer any integration capabilities. Looking to find a way to make the most of their existing investment of phones, the customer started looking for a replacement carrier that did allow integration capabilities and found Alteva. The sales, engineering, and application development teams at Alteva came together to create a secure and stable API front end that allowed the customer to integrate not only their CRM and workflow applications, but also live call detail record feeds to their reporting systems.

Within 90 days after implementation, the customer was able to realign their resources, reduce their operating expenses much more than originally expected and increase their customer satisfaction scores across the board. In addition, they are seeing an uptick in revenues which they attribute to some of the changes that were made.

It would be foolish to assume that Alteva’s capabilities were totally responsible for creating the savings for this customer, but they certainly were an integral part.

Key Accomplishments

• By integrating their existing Web-based self-help system with their telephony infrastructure and a hosted IVR, this customer was able to reduce inbound support calls by 18 percent.
• CRM and auto dialer integration allowed for a reduction of nearly 87 percent in call processing time. Previously, sales reps on calling campaigns as well as service center representatives making callbacks were initiating calls from the keypads on their phones. The average time to process an outbound dial was 7.8 seconds. After integrating the CRM and service workflow applications with their telephony platform, their dial times were reduced to just under one second.
• Hosted call recording and intelligence metrics allowed for a reduction in training time. With the capability of tagging successful sales calls for recording, the sales teams were able to integrate actual calls into the training programs, not only reducing the actual training time and expenses for new sales associates, but also improving the call to meeting rate across the board.
• Using intelligence metrics to identify caller or callee trending, the customer was able to create more efficient workflow by routing callers more appropriately and reducing unnecessary manual routing stops along the way.

With all of the development and addition of new features (IVR, auto dialer, call recording), the customer increased their telecom spend by just over 30 percent. These features enabled their business to become much more lean and efficient across the board and accomplish their overall cost savings goals.

The Winners and Losers

The customer was obviously a big winner, as they reached their goals. Alteva was also a winner, as they not only acquired a new customer, but also increased the customer’s spend in the process.

The loser isn’t just the carrier that lost this business, but all of the carriers who refuse to innovate and enable their customers through out-of-the-box thinking and capabilities.

The Lesson

So what’s the lesson here? The old school of disparate systems are a thing of the past. Businesses in general are looking for easy and effective ways to bring processes and systems together so that more can be done with less. Businesses today should be looking for the dual ROI — not only a return on investment, but also a return on innovation.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.

So as I begin this blog, my first inclination was to take this entry to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about my credentials and why I will be a valid source. Sure, I have background and experience in telecommunications and technology, but anything I advertise here would be just words. You, as my reader, will develop your own conclusions about how relevant my opinions are. I am a technologist by heart and trade. I have an inner fire that burns toward innovation and the advancement of great technologies. In the interest of full disclosure, I own and am the CEO of a hosted communications provider named Alteva, headquartered in Philadelphia. While my blogs may seem biased towards our technologies, it is because I have done extensive research and investigation and have chosen to offer only the most innovative and stable technologies to our customers. I assure you that when I offer an opinion that is in line with that of my company, it is not due to self interest but rather the fact that Alteva offers the technologies I truly believe are game-changing innovations.

I begin with a topic that is at the front of everyone’s mind: THE ECONOMY.

Two weeks ago, I spoke at Broadsoft Connections 2008, a seminar targeted toward hosted service providers of communications services. My topic was about how carriers need to innovate and develop on their platforms to remain relevant within the telecom space. It is a topic that I will cover in a future blog as it is a crucially important topic that demands its own time. At the event, I met with CEO's from many firms within the hosted VoIP space and discussed the market for their products. They, for the most part, had the same message: Business has never been better. I can confirm this as my communications as a service firm, Alteva, is seeing the same success.

So why is it that when most business are contemplating downsizing, cost reductions, or actions to protect their organizations from the downturn that this segment of carrier services is flourishing?

In an economic downturn, businesses as a whole go into a protection mode. They stop spending and assess their finances, operations, and sales. Maybe a few adjustments are made, then the wait-and-see attitude is adopted. They begin asking questions like: Is there a new process or procedure that we could implement to save money? Are our employees being as productive as we need them to be? What can we stop doing ¬or how can we change our approach ¬to transition an expense in one area to improve productivity in another? Some of these businesses see enhancing their communications systems as a way to increase productivity or reduce costs. It is this re-examination of their operation that drives them to investigate what new options are available.

So what are the options? In regard to PBX capabilities there are really only two. The first is a premises-based PBX where the company purchases or leases the equipment, adopts the maintenance fees, and then either keeps their existing carrier or chooses a new one. The second is a hosted PBX where the business usually only buys the handsets and replaces their current carrier with a hosted service provider that can provide all of the PBX functionality from their switching facilities. Previously the feature sets of hosted solutions were a limiting factor but service providers running the later versions of switching software can provide more robust capabilities than most premises-based offerings.

Hosted VoIP, to some degree, took a back seat to premises-based solutions. Many companies are resistant to change and going from a model where they own it to someone else owning it and they essentially buy it as a service seems like an uncomfortable proposition. But at a time when cost reductions are as important as ever, hosted solutions demanded a second look.

As you may know, there are many benefits to choosing a switching service that is hosted from the cloud: reduced capital expense, virtually indestructible redundancy (if built right), location independence, no need for the user to manage hardware, great FMC (fixed mobile convergence), etc. It used to come with its challenges, mostly in the form of quality of the call, but, for the most part, if you choose a mature provider with a good network, quality issues are a thing of a past.

But in this air of economic uncertainty, the truly defining characteristic is the ROI (return on investment). The hosted platforms of today offer real ROIs. They offer startup expenses that average 22 percent of a competing premises-based PBX with a reduced monthly

cost as well. In a premises-based solution, the customer pays the maintenance fees to the PBX manufacturer and the carrier fees to their carrier. In the hosted solution, there are no maintenance fees. This reduction in monthly costs creates a real ROI in businesses where there never used to be one.

In a good economy, 12 percent of businesses refresh their telecom every year and in a bad economy we are estimating those percentages dwindle to 3 percent. Three percent of all businesses is still a staggering number. We are talking about millions of lines up for grabs. Don’t forget the air of uncertainty is still there and it is THAT economic uncertainty that is driving businesses towards hosted solutions. Why spend 78 percent more for a premises-based PBX when you can get the same functionality from a hosted provider for dramatically less?

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.