Monday, August 29, 2011

C-Link Adds Hosted

CenturyLinnk is a merger of Embarq (formerly Sprint wireline, formerly United Telephone), CenturyTel (a rural ILEC headquartered in Monroe, LA), Qwest (a company made up of a Long Distance fiber company and the RBOC formerly called US West), and then Savvis (formerly a ISP turned managed cloud provider). In this mix were a lot of products.

"The company already had a managed IP-PBX offering for large enterprise and federal customers nationwide, but they were experiencing high operating costs, scaling issues and limitations in adding new UC services. They also lacked multi-tenant capability and were not able to offer a web-based management portal....Also, Qwest required a solution to tie their hosted contact center into the managed IP-PBX offer, plus they needed to migrate their Centrex customers, and integrate their BSS/OSS for billing, customer service, tech support and trouble ticketing." This solution ended up being VOSS and Cisco HUCS. C-Link may be using Cisco for Federal and Large Business, but I'm pretty sure its Broadsoft in the SMB space. The toolbar is a CommPilot. And I'm assuming that when you write "such as the ANYWHERE feature" that it is Broadsoft based.

Interesting FAQ here

. The customer has to have a CenturyLink circuit and use IP Phones. C-Link must have figured out - well, Embarq rolled it out first so that side probably finally figured out - that you can NOT scale Hosted VoIP roll-outs without a cookie cutter. Each deployment has to be the same. Think back to the days of dial-up or early DSL, when tech support had no idea what modem was in use and how time consuming that was. Uniformity is important for scale.

"CenturyLink sells and supports a variety of IP phone sets including Cisco™, Aastra™ and Polycom™ brand IP phones."

"CenturyLink Hosted VoIP does not yet support IP faxing. If you would like faxing service, CenturyLink can install a traditional fax line."

Are you rolling out Hosted PBX, hosted UC, hosted VoIP or Cloud Communications? There will be a two-hour VoIP Deployment workshop in Vegas on Oct. 13, 2011. Register here. (You can hit me up for a discount code).

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