I recently had the chance to talk with Frank Paterno. Frank's the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Intelliverse. They focus on providing hosted VoIP services for the SMB market.

Intelliverse is a leading provider of communications services for the Enterprise, Wholesale and Small & Medium Business market sectors. Our business is creating industry-specific communications solutions. We do this by aligning sets of technology-based applications around specific business dynamics. The result is a suite of value-driven communications packages to address your specific business needs. Communications Solved.

Founded in 1986, Intelliverse offers the stability of an established company plus the agility of an innovative technology provider. From over 20 years of experience, we've learned that Technology is one thing; technology applied is quite another. With solid technology foundations in VoIP, IVR, and messaging, our Solutions recognize and address the issues important to you. We are passionately committed to listen, to hear, and to respond to the daily and long-term needs of our clients around the world. What will shape the telecommunications solution we provide you is not our technology, but your needs.

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First, here's some background on Frank from their web site:

Frank Paterno
VP, Marketing

Mr. Paterno is responsible for all of Intelliverse's Marketing activities including marketing communications, product management, and strategic development. Frank and his team strive to generate maximum sales activity by continually evaluating market conditions and creating industry-focused service offerings that effectively meet the demands of Intelliverse’s customers.

Before moving into his current role at Intelliverse, Frank was most recently the Director of Product Management and previously the Channel Manager for Wholesale Services. Prior to joining Intelliverse in 1999, Frank worked for MCI and Arthur Andersen.

Frank received a Bachelor of Sciences in Accounting from the State University of New York at Geneseo.

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One thing that's important to me is noting that Intelliverse isn't a new upstart company in the telecommuncations arena. They've been around for 20 years. Back they, they were known as VoiceCom , part of what's become Ptech Holdings. About 5 years ago, they took the current company private and detached from those public company holdings.

One area in their history that's notable is the wholesale calling card business. The provided specially branded calling cards for the airline industry and companies like American Express. So if you've ever been delayed in flight travel and the airline handed you a calling card to make phone calls letting people know about the delays, there's a good chance this is where it came from.

They've also played a solid role in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. n that history, one of their clients was Nation's Bank, what's now part of Bank of America. And while today that solution is managed in house by B of A, it's the Intelliverse relationship and history that helped create the automated IVR system that today front-ends BofA services.

Intelliverse found themselves at a point where they had the infrastructure and IVR experience that gave them a viable model for building hosted VoIP and IVR solutions. Today they serve a number of retail organizations with large distributed business centers. The two examples that stoof out for me were Cingular Wireless and LensCrafters. Thes are companies with small business branches operating in storefronts and kiosks in malls across the country. Intelliverse helps provide their telecommunications front end.

They also provide a variety of hosted voice messaging solutions that play directly to the SOHO and SMB business sectors. Whether it's an accounting firm, real estate brokerage, law office, or one of the popular MLM product business like Amway or Mary Kaye, the need to stay in touch with customers is paramount to business success.

With an acquisition of Inuntias, Intelliverse really brings some solid service solutions to the SMB market.

Benefits to the SMB Customer Enterprise class features on a SMB budget. Your customers can bridge the communications gap between the main office by linking remote locations and home-based workers with a fully hosted IP-based service at a low cost of entry. Very often, your clients can simply “plug and play” and avoid costly installation fees and capital investment.

Auto-Attendant is a 24-hour automated system that answers all incoming calls, presents a brief menu of choices and efficiently routes callers.

Hunt Group creation allows you to create and maintain your own list of phone numbers that are available to efficiently answer incoming calls, by either blast or sequential groups.

Extension Dialing and Call Transfer provides reliable PBX quality extension dialing. With the benefit of IP communications, your remote and home-based workers can set up four-digit extension dialing, regardless of their location.

Self Administration: Allows you the ability to create and manage user accounts within a single master account. This technology will save a SMB client external programming charges and provide internal tracking features.

I was very impressed with the solid solution set Intelliverse brings to the market. If you're looking for a solution for your business, they're a company you might want to check out.

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