Ifbyphone gets first carrier customer for SIP applications offering

Ifbyphone announced its first carrier customer for its "cloud telephony" SIP application service. Network Communications, a CLEC based in Longview, Texas, will connect to Ifbyphone's servers though SIP trunking, which the companies said will allow Network Communications to offer telephony applications such as "find me" call forwarding, call tracking and IVR to its enterprise customers.

"Ifbyphone offers a tremendous set of telephone automation services that are easy for SMB (small- to medium-sized business) customers to deploy and use, and they offered us a flexible pricing model that was very attractive," Gary Honeycutt, director of network operations at Network Communications, said in a release. "We have already begun selling the new services to our SMB customers under our brand, and our customers are delighted."

The deal comes less than a month after Ifbyphone announced the availability [1] of the SIP trunking applications offering for carriers. Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro said the company also is in talks with other carriers to launch the white-labeled telephony services.

"These smaller carriers used to be able to compete on price, but now they need to compete on features as well," Shapiro said. "They can't be sure without market testing which ones will work well for their market, either, so Ifbyphone's solution is very attractive for their needs. They can lease a small number of application ports, do trial runs and scale up the specific applications that catch on in their market."

For more:
- see the Ifbyphone release here [2]