Flat Planet’s wholesale program should help bring VoIP to the masses

What does it take to be a VoIP reseller? By the end of March the answer will be $199 and an hour of your time; that’s when Flat Planet Phone Company plans to open the doors on its wholesale hosted VoIP solution. "With start-ups you always assume that somebody else is doing the same thing," says Moshe Maeir, Flat Planet’s chief flattening officer (CFO). "A lot of companies are looking to get into the small-business PBX hosting , but we haven’t seen anybody doing the same business model. We hope we’re a step ahead." Under Flat Planet’s business model, resellers who sign up receive a website with their own brand name and details, along with four basic pre-packaged user plans. Flat Planet hosts the website on its server and provides phone services including hosted PBX, mobile-to-VoIP connectivity, SIP-to-Skype, and disposable numbers. The company even collects payments and sends a monthly cheque with a percentage of customer revenues to the reseller. "At 200 bucks to set up a VoIP company it’s hard to go wrong," says Steve Lecomte, director of business development at Ottawa-based Iotum Corp., whose relevance engine is integrated with the Flat Planet service. "Theoretically, all these people that sign up with Flat Planet and go into business with them will only have to worry about selling." Maeir chose this unique wholesale model not only for the benefit of resellers but for end users, as well Flat Planet itself. From a user standpoint, he says his service will cater to small businesses, particularly ones with multiple office locations who are currently served by VoIP providers such as Vonage, which can offer some savings, but not full PBX features. Maeir can attest to this from personal experience as he is located in Israel, Flat Planet’s servers are in New York, and its developers are in Israel as well as the US and the UK. Keeping all of these locations connected, or flattening the planet, is extremely desirable. "We all know that today it really doesn’t matter where you are, but it’s more what you can do," says Maeir. "If you’re HP, IBM or General Electric you can set up your own gigantic phone system and connect everybody up wherever you open plants, but if you’re a little guy trying to break into the world market, you don’t always have that ability. I think this can enable a lot of little companies to compete on the world level." Iotum’s Lecomte agrees. "Being a hosted environment is going to open up possibilities with different organizations around the world," he says. "It’s clearly a global organization." The benefit to Iotum of partnering with Flat Planet is it pushes the relevance engine further into the marketplace (for more on the relevance engine see the June issue of Network Letter affiliate publication Telemanagment). Indeed, Maeir says Flat Planet’s current beta program is being carried out in locations from Peru to Japan, and adds that the company has more resellers interested in taking part in the program than it can handle. This, of course, is promising news since maximizing the customer base is another impetus behind Flat Planet’s strategy. Unlike Vonage, which spends millions of dollars a year on advertising and marketing to attract customers, Flat Planet is outsourcing its sales. While the program is available to anyone willing to put down the $199 yearly fee, Maeir says the optimal reseller will be someone with an established customer base in one sector who’s looking to market extra services. He gives examples of two companies that have applied to take part in the beta program: the first is a group of European freelancers who provide dictation services and want to sell a service where customers can call and dictate directly to a PBX that records the call to be transcribed later; and the second is a company that provides IT services to small companies and wants to add PBXs to its suite of computers, networks and software. The second company is perhaps a more obvious choice as a reseller, but the first illustrates the level of personalization small companies can achieve with a Flat Planet system. "Voice over IP isn’t about saving money, its about how you collaborate with your work group, how you can more efficiently manage your calls, keep in touch, distribute information and things like that," says Maeir. "There’s plenty of companies with five to 20 people who staff people in one place and developers in another place, and maybe a warehouse some place else, and they want to operate like one unit." Flat Planet’s price tag should only further the penetration of VoIP and its features into the business market. Maeir, who is also a partner in a Voice over IP reseller, says resellers today, even ones wanting to set up their own partition on somebody else’s switch, have to invest tens of thousands of dollars in personnel and equipment.He continues: "I think there are people that want to get into this business, either because they’re already in something similar – resellers of PBX’s, network installers – or maybe they’re some kind of telecom agent and they want to get into the Voice over IP business but they really don’t want to put in the investment." At less than $200 a year, there’s nothing stopping them now.

Flat Planet’s wholesale program should help bring VoIP to the masses

News | January 19, 2007

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