Sometimes timing is everything, as it was for the initial acquisition of the domain phone.com — more than 15 years ago, as Senior Vice President/CCO, Joel Maloff, explained. What else could you do with that but create a phone company? And now that company has grown to over 100 employees, serving SMEs across the US and Canada with a range of cloud-based phone services.
Timing was also critical in terms of connecting with iotum a year ago, when Phone.com were starting to experiment with their own offering for video conferencing.
“We had developed in-house, and it was OK”, Maloff reflected. “But we had one of those decision points that comes to companies, where we needed to determine, are we a software development company? Are we an applications integrator, are we a phone company?” And looked at from the primary purpose perspective, the decision to buy in exactly what they need in terms of Callbridge’s programmable video product made complete sense.
The right pivot at the right time
[caption id="attachment_34539" align="alignright" width="200"]
Joel Maloff[/caption]
Luckily the contractual and technical integrations went smoothly, and soon the three different packages of video conferencing that Phone.com chose to offer were embedded in their user dashboard and control panel in exactly the way they wanted — completely white-labelled, as a manifestly on-brand element of the overall functionality. They also had to ensure HIPAA compliance across the new platform as well, to offer the video conferencing function to all their customers, which include those operating in sensitive areas like health/mental health.
Clearly, this partnership, involving lots of journeys from one side of Florida to the other initially, got sorted out just in time — before the whole world discovered video conferencing in new ways early this year. Vital services, like the aforementioned mental health consultations, could pivot directly to robust and compliant video calling, ensuring continuity of service for vulnerable patients, to take one example of the kind of businesses Phone.com support with their VoIP communications services. This responsive service led to Phone.com winning the Cloud Communications 2020 Video Conferencing Excellence Award, for supporting their customers so effectively at this critical time.
Business continuity and the shift to remote
Not only were Phone.com able to keep their clients, and their client’s clients, connected and communicating through the crisis, the new video conferencing toolset was also crucial to their internal collaboration and business continuity.
