VoIP Industry Newsletter: Hosted PBX - Why it Finally Makes Sense for Small and Medium Businesses

Feb 2010

A Conversation with Peter Langas, President, IPiphany

Please tell us a little bit about IPiphany - its market and industry.
IPiphany is a managed services provider targeting small and medium sized businesses on a national basis.

Where are IPiphany headquarters?
Rolling Meadows, IL (outside Chicago)

What is the IPiphany business offering?
We provide businesses with managed voice and data solutions that deliver phone system features, email and other applications over an IP connection. Our clients outsource their phone, email and other systems to us so they don’t have to buy and maintain expensive servers and systems. In doing so, we shift the traditional on-premise, capital-intensive model to a hosted, monthly operational expense.

Please explain how your business is unique. Our readers always enjoy any “out-of-the-box” nuggets about your Company that you’d care to share.
We’re not just a “phone” company. IPiphany strives to create a trusted advisor relationship with our clients; we offer a complete suite of managed services so that our clients can outsource many or all of their IT needs to us. Or, as some of them like to say, “have one throat to choke.” We find they want to focus on running their business, and consequently, they don’t want to be dragged down with managing phone systems and system administration on their email server a few times a week.

We specialize in clients that are spread across multiple locations that want a reliable, homogenous infrastructure they can manage easily with minimal in-house staff resources. The ability to consolidate vendors and systems creates a powerful value proposition.

When we started IPiphany 9 years ago, our original concept / mantra was that an IP pipe could be used to support multiple applications that live somewhere else. We were onto the whole concept of applications being in the cloud…we just didn’t know it! It just took awhile for the technology to catch up and the cost of bandwidth to drop. We even named the company as a play on words of having an epiphany over what IP could do for you. Incidentally, the guy who thought up the name for us went on to play major league baseball with the Cubs and Cardinals!

Can you prognosticate about the future and/or describe any current and key industry trends to which you are responding?
Clearly, mobility is going to be huge. I don’t think we are too far off from the traditional handset on the desk being replaced by a smart-phone device that serves as cell phone, office phone, home phone, etc.

We are seeing a lot of demand also for presence as well. This can mean a lot of different things, such as managing location and availability across all devices, i.e., if you have an appointment in their calendar, and can you do some predefined routing of calls or messages. I think both these concepts speak towards the importance of people wanting to be as efficient as possible and as responsive as possible, too. For us, what’s really nice about our managed services model is that these type of new applications and solutions are easy to deliver to our clients because they don’t have to buy new software or hardware.

How has VoIP Logic been of service to you?
VoIP Logic has been an excellent partner for us. Their commitment to a stable, reliable network lets us concentrate on supporting our clients and adding new businesses to our client base with confidence. They have allowed us to easily scale our business with a predictable cost model and they continue to innovate as well. Lastly, they have been extremely flexible, meeting our needs and responding quickly to issues on the rare occasions they have occurred.
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