I am preparing a sourcebook of hosted/cloud based communications service provides that will be issued in February and posted at www.webtorials.com. As part of this effort, I searched the Internet for such providers and discovered about 200 companies that offer the hosted/cloud communications service. One of the providers is FluentStream Technologies. Joshua Elson, the CEO provided answers to several questions that I posed regarding FluentStream’s entry into the hosted/cloud communications service business. The interview is divided into this blog Part1 and a subsequent blog Part 2 focusing on Net Neutrality and the anticipated market changes.
Josh, why did you start in the hosted communications business?
As I was exposed to the entire world of voice and data communications in the corporate world, I was often struck by the observation that the relationship between the "phone guy" and the "IT guy" in the prototypical enterprise was something rather unusual. There were often literal, physical divisions between them and, just as often, disparate reporting structures. Neither side often recognized the many touch points between telecommunications and information technology and they certainly weren't developing solutions jointly. FluentStream represents an attempt to bridge the best elements of both worlds.
The hosted model was a natural outgrowth of technology developed for the call center and specialty enterprise markets over the past few years. The small to medium call center demands significant technological flexibility that incumbent telecom companies had difficulty addressing. As such, the first software telecommunications solutions we developed were to give a small to medium call center feature parity, or perhaps even feature advantages over the proprietary monolithic platforms they previously had to choose from. The ability to move into the hosted communication space for enterprise and SMB followed naturally from there. The core of what we felt was our competitive advantage--a software standards-based platform, highly flexible integration to key business processes, and simplified inclusive pricing--made as much sense in developing hosted solutions as it did in going on premise.
What models of hosted service do you offer?
FluentStream offers a number of models in providing hosted service, both in terms of technology components and purchasing model. We offer full cloud, hybrid, and primary on premise solutions, based on the same core FluentCloud architecture. In providing a financial model that is flexible for our customers, we offer a wide variety of purchase and lease options for equipment and service and can provide fully bundled pricing to give a business a very predictable monthly spend.
Whose cloud infrastructure do you use? One interesting element of our business is that, as ourselves a provider of cloud services, we are simultaneously a consumer of a number of infrastructures as service offerings. Providers like Amazon and Rackspace serve as flexible underpinnings of some components of our infrastructure. To the extent that we ourselves use on demand metered computing resources from our underlying providers, we are able to pass on the savings to our customers.
Next page: Why hosted?
What are the benefits of using a cloud based infrastructure service instead of your own platform?
As I mentioned above, the principal benefit for us is the ability to purchase underlying resources that linearly map to the growth of our own cloud platform. While we've had to deal with some challenges both in technology and business-processes, this model has allowed us to scale in ways that would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago.
How have you dealt with security and compliance issues for the cloud based service?
The notion of the "cloud" has been introduced quite a few new issues in the realm of security and compliance. One aspect of addressing this for FluentStream is by steadfastly holding to our corporate philosophy of being transparent in our solution delivery. This means that our infrastructure, to the extent possible, is open to inspection by our clients and their auditors. With appropriate legal safeguards, we are also able to provide detailed source-code level reviews of components of our solutions. This is a level of transparency not often seen in hosting providers, but we take our customer concerns around these issues very seriously. In general, the effect the "cloud" will have on the world of security and compliance is still something that the industry as whole is grappling with. We, along with our partners and the ecosystem at large, will continue to adapt, improve, and manage both technical and legal controls on our cloud infrastructure.
What markets are you pursuing?
With respect to our cloud offering, we pursue a number of verticals and market segments--healthcare, SMB, and a new push into the underserved hospitality world. In general, we very much like working with companies that don't see their communications infrastructure in isolation. We compare favorably when flexibility, rapid feature development, and the benefit that integrating a blended voice solution into a business process are important to a client. In 2011, we expect to pursue several opportunities for international expansion as well as look to expand our partner and reseller network FluentStream Technologies is a provider of cloud, enterprise, and call center telecommunications solutions, cutting across a wide variety of market segments and with a highly diverse customer base. We were formed in 2008. In retrospect, while a significant recession wouldn't conventionally seem the ideal time to start a business, it did impose a form of discipline onto the company culture that has been helpful in viscerally feeling the challenges faced by our customers and meaningfully addressing them.
