Alteva grows despite economy

Service provider's sales rise 45% over 2008

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

With the top tier phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T reporting recent revenue declines in Q2 2009, we found one service provider providing hosted VoIP that seems to keep growing despite an economic downturn. At Alteva, Louis Hayner, vice president of sales, says his company has averaged growth over the last three years of 66%, and this year's sales at mid-year are already 45% higher than in 2008.

Founded in 2003 and profitable since 2006, Alteva provides IP PBX replacement service for companies with 50 to 5,000 employees and has customers in 48 states and nine countries. While Alteva's average enterprise customer has about 200 employees, Alteva also has customers with more than 5,400 employees.

Hayner attributes his company's success to several factors. The most obvious factor (and one we've seen for nearly five years) is the broadening acceptance of VoIP as a technology. Features that appeal to businesses are also important such as advanced call center queuing, live reporting for enhancing marketing, hosted call recording, and direct CRM ties such as APIs for Salesforce.com and ACT!.

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With the top tier phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T reporting recent revenue declines in Q2 2009, we found one service provider providing hosted VoIP that seems to keep growing despite an economic downturn. At Alteva, Louis Hayner, vice president of sales, says his company has averaged growth over the last three years of 66%, and this year's sales at mid-year are already 45% higher than in 2008.

Founded in 2003 and profitable since 2006, Alteva provides IP PBX replacement service for companies with 50 to 5,000 employees and has customers in 48 states and nine countries. While Alteva's average enterprise customer has about 200 employees, Alteva also has customers with more than 5,400 employees.

Hayner attributes his company's success to several factors. The most obvious factor (and one we've seen for nearly five years) is the broadening acceptance of VoIP as a technology. Features that appeal to businesses are also important such as advanced call center queuing, live reporting for enhancing marketing, hosted call recording, and direct CRM ties such as APIs for Salesforce.com and ACT!.

In Alteva's case, the hosted model is especially compelling because capital expenditures are lower than a premise-based solution, reducing the initial barriers to entry. It is important to note, however, that the Alteva solution can include some hardware costs. In one case study, the customer's annual telecom expense was $852,887 and after Alteva's solution was fully deployed, annual expenses dropped to $592,785. When factoring in the $138,737 needed for network hardware upgrades, the customer had an ROI in less than seven months.

When we asked Hayner about the strategic imperative of unified communications with his customers, he said that by itself,  UC isn't critical today because his customers are "not at 100% adoption." But he noted the capability to deploy UC either in small parts of the business today or across the entire enterprise at a future date is very important.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.