* The Alianza PowerPlatform
If you’re lucky enough to live in an area of the country that is served by multiple broadband service providers, you’ve probably noticed how intensely they are competing for new customers. Most of the service offerings seem to be around Internet, digital phone and maybe television access. If Alianza has any say, the competition and the range of broadband services is about to explode.
Alianza is making it much easier for smaller broadband companies to enter the market or expand their offerings by providing a hosted, fully-integrated IP-based platform for delivering unified communications applications via software-as-a-service (SaaS). Alianza’s proprietary PowerPlatform enables broadband service providers to launch private-labeled solutions quickly – often in less than 30 days – with no capital expenditures.
The Alianza PowerPlatform has all the key components required by broadband service providers to offer advanced IP telephony services to residential and SMB customers, including Soft Switch; Session Border Controller; Carrier Interface; Virtual PBX; Billing System; and a Hardware Provisioning Interface. By taking advantage of these built-in components, service providers can reduce their need to maintain a large technical staff. And because Alianza hosts everything, the service provider doesn’t need to make big investments in equipment. Theoretically, at least, this should lead to more competition in the local carrier market because the barriers to entry (i.e., cost and expertise) will be much lower.
The Alianza PowerPlatform also includes two Web-based management portals. The Account Management Portal allows end users to directly manage their own account, for example, to purchase new products or services, modify settings, get educated, and view reports. The Alianza Tools and Administrative Center is a complete back-office management system for the service provider that includes staging management, administrative tools, help desk, and a reporting interface.
In addition, a service provider can use the Alianza PowerPlatform to develop its own customized application or service, say for a specific vertical market, through Alianza’s API. If the company that developed the application wants to make extra revenue, it can sell access to the application to other service providers, who in turn offer it as a service to their end customers. This helps to create a small ecosystem of Alianza customers that depend on each other for custom applications to expand their service offerings and revenue opportunities.
Alianza is based in Utah. Since 2003, the company has concentrated on refining and proving its value proposition throughout North, Central, and South America. The company has established branches in Mexico, Argentina and Singapore as part of its ongoing strategy to service English and Spanish-speaking markets worldwide. Beginning this month, Alianza is making a bigger push into the U.S. market, where it has been working with a number of companies to prove the SaaS business model for the unified communications market.
