-- Thinking Phone Networks offers one of the most comprehensive hosted communications and collaboration portfolios in North America
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the hosted IP telephony and unified communications and collaboration (UCC) services market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Thinking Phone Networks, Inc. with the 2013 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for Company of the Year. The company has leapfrogged into the top echelons of the hosted IP telephony and UCC market with its ability to deliver reliable, scalable, feature-rich hosted communications solutions to medium, large, and increasingly global enterprises. It has outperformed many of its competitors in terms of installed base and revenue growth rates, customer churn, service availability, feature enhancements and channel expansion.
Thinking Phone Networks owes much of its success to its deeply integrated and mobility-enabled cloud software platform, unique network design, robust analytics capability, continued product enhancements and expanding distribution channel. Its extensive enterprise software development expertise has enabled it to develop its own hosted communications applications platform based on open-source technologies. This, in turn, allows the company to innovate more rapidly and to add new capabilities and capacity at much lower costs.
"The company offers a compelling telephony and collaboration applications feature set through its ThinkingSuite portfolio; it is also focused on enabling integrations with various third-party platforms and solutions," said Frost & Sullivan Program Director Elka Popova. "Through open application programming interfaces (APIs), both Thinking Phone Networks and its partners can quickly and easily develop plug-ins for popular applications such as salesforce.com, Microsoft Lync or GoogleApps, as well as customer-specific, 'homegrown' applications."
One of the reasons the company has achieved this level of success is its tight focus on the medium and large enterprises. Furthermore, in its bid to gain higher shares in the global market, it has significantly expanded its channel partner network and has more than doubled its direct sales force.
Instead of competing on price, the company differentiates through advanced features and capabilities. In addition to complete PBX functionality, Thinking Phone Networks offers mobility, UC soft clients, instant message and presence, contact center, conferencing and video. It also provides advanced provisioning and analytics tools that enable both partners and customer organizations to more easily and cost-effectively deploy and manage the company's hosted communication solutions. This is a testament to its ability to sell its services based on superior value rather than costs.
Thinking Phone Networks reports a low churn rate of less than 1 percent in terms of businesses, which demonstrates high customer satisfaction. The superior customer satisfaction and retention rates can be traced to its consistent service quality and reliability. In its service-level agreements (SLAs), the provider commits to five 9s (99.999 percent) service availability and a four-hour mean time to repair. It offers compensation/credit to customers affected by downtime or in cases of inability to repair services within the SLA specifications. It uses multiple carriers with redundant connections at each data center for access to the public switched network (PSTN) in order to eliminate a single point of failure.
Thinking Phone Networks is one of the first providers to offer a mobile UC client that provides users with access to all of the company's communications applications on the mobile device. Almost 40 percent of Thinking Phone Networks' customers have deployed this functionality, and the adoption rate is accelerating, with 85 percent of new customers deploying the mobile client for their employees.
Thinking Phone Networks also offers a unique, advanced presence capability, the ThinkingCommunicator, which presence-enables people, devices, and business tasks and processes. What makes Thinking Phone Networks' presence capability even more attractive is its built-in, point-to-point video calling capability.
Thinking Phone Networks offers several competitively priced packages as well as the ability to deploy features and capabilities a-la-carte. The UC Utility package includes basic private branch exchange (PBX) functionality, voicemail, direct inward dialing (DID) numbers, and features such as caller ID.
"In 2012, the company ranked seventh in terms of installed users and eighth in terms of hosted telephony and UCC services revenue in the North American market. These are remarkable accomplishments given the fragmented nature of the market and the presence of powerful and well-established market participants," noted Popova. "In 2013, the company is on track to achieving 60 percent revenue growth and end the year with nearly 160,000 installed users."
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in terms of growth strategy and implementation. The award recognizes a high degree of innovation with products and technologies, and the resulting leadership in terms of customer value and market penetration.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
Contact:
Mireya Espinoza
P: +1-210-247-3870
F: +1-210-348-1003
E: mireya.espinoza@frost.com
