VoIP Industry Newsletter: Understanding the Impact of Cloud Computing for VoIP

Oct 2009

A conversation with Fidel Salgueiro
Gerente General (General Manager) 123.com.ve

Tell me about your company.
We operate in four countries: In the US with OPEXTEL, based in Miami; Colombia with Fortaleza; Venezuela with our flagship 123.com.ve; and Panama with Fortaleza. 123.com.ve is 100 employees and has revenues of approximately $US 45 million per year.

Please tell me more about your business offering.
In Venezuela we offer long distance services (both national and international), wholesale and retail services, Internet, and value-added services. In addition, we are a 3com, NORTEL and CISCO partner, allowing us to include IP–PBXs as well as national and international services to our customers.

In the US, we offer wholesale and retail services, including IP-PBX services, and hosted and IP-PBX appliances. Our focus is on telephony applications that are integrated with the Internet.

Our readers always enjoy any “out-of-the-box” nuggets about your Company that you’d care to share.
We have been interested in open source and working on integration applications for quite a while. 123.com.ve as a company dedicates 15% of our revenue to research and development.

Currently, we will show applications like an IMMERX, an Interactive CRM, or our prepaid platform based on ASTERIX, or even our IP-PBX hosted solution, wholly developed by our internal technical team. We feel that keeping up with the technology is an important part of learning to use it more effectively.

Can you prognosticate about the future? Describe any current industry trends to which 123.com.ve is responding.
We see the competition with voice 2.0 and easy convergence of IP Telephony with all kinds of other applications.

We’re closely watching the adoption of services such as Skype (which according to Telegeography concentrates 8% of the worldwide international long distance traffic), Peerio, and PhoneGnome. How long before the majority of existing customers in the IP Networks change to these new models?

More broadly speaking, we’re interested in areas such as voice apps, IT Applications for Voice, Voice Web Applications, and XML Web-based API Developments. There is a lot going on. This is clearly an exciting time for VoIP and for telephony.

How has VoIP Logic been of service to you?
Our experience working with VoIP Logic has been very good. We have received excellent attention and positive results when we confront technical challenges. By working in conjunction with VoIP Logic specialists, we have witnessed great improvement in how we use our Genband platform, which in turn has resulted in our offering a better service to our clients.

We hope to continue growing with VoIP Logic and receiving the personalized and always on-time attention that VoIP Logic has given us.

www.123.com.ve
123.com.ve is a 100 percent Venezuelan company, founded in 2006 when ENTEL Venezuela was acquired by Venezuelan local investors. A young, dynamic telecom company with innovative services based in a secure and reliable NGN Network, 123.com.ve provides integrated solutions for voice, video and data. The Company also offers services for National and International Long Distance, Data Solutions, Internet Access, Unified messaging, Call Centers, Web and Voice 2.0 applications among many other related services through their three business units for different markets: 123hogar, 123Telecom and 123Global.
  Next>>