NetworkIP : Hosted Services Platform : Prepaid Products and Services

Last Wednesday at PTC ‘09 in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii, our CEO and President, Pete Pattullo, participated in a Telecom 2.0 panel moderated by Gary Kim of IP Business magazine. Joining Pete on the panel were IntelePeer CEO Frank Fawzi and Jeff Lattomus, Area VP of MetaSwitch.

Pete shared with Gary and the audience that NetworkIP formed in 1997 as a Telecom 2.0 company; we built our platform from a “clean sheet of paper” and pioneered a revolutionary business model (at the time) of providing hosted voice applications for customers. Back then, the Telecom 2.0 label didn’t exist, and analysts often categorized us as a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier).

Now, 10 years later, our core voice and transaction services platform is highly evolved. Our patented software has matured through 8 iterations. Our hosted services model makes it easy for customers to run and manage all varieties and complexities of business applications. And while we process over 25 million API transactions a month, we realize that those APIs are only the table stakes of Telecom 2.0.

For we are all about enabling frictionless transactions and solutions for the enterprise that enable customers to easily and cost-effectively solve complex business problems and drive efficiency, especially in this challenging economic climate.

Pete further elaborated that In 2009, our subsidiary, Jaduka, will be working closely with partners like IBM and initiating new relationships to meet the growing demands of Fortune 2000 companies. We’ll also integrate our real-time transaction processing engine, our billing solution, and provisioning capabilities in ways that save our customers money and enhance their business processes.

Telecom 2.0: that’s where we’re headed.

Brian Kirk
VP Business Development
NetworkIP & Jaduka

I commented last week on how many businesses are turning to innovative telephony services such as conferencing to avoid the high costs associated with employee travel. Today while reading about Netflix’s second-quarter net income, which climbed 3.8%, I thought to myself “How did they do it?”

In the middle of googling for other reports about Netflix it hit me – technology is saving their business!

As the price of gas continues to rise, so do the cost of going to the movies. As a result, more consumers are staying at home to watch movies & many of them are renting those movies through Netflix. Unfortunately for Netflix, higher fuel prices are also driving up the costs to deliver movies to the consumer’s mailbox. Netflix’s margin is already pretty thin & those margins can be completely eaten up if you have a consumer base that is exchanging movies almost as fast as they get them. Netflix’s subscritpion model allows their users to exchange as many movies as he/she wants per month & their subscription fee stays the same. This model works very well for the consumer & until recently worked for Netflix too.

Rather than drastically changer their model & risk loosing existing subscribers, Netflix responded with an innovative solution using technology to their advantage. This new solution actually provides more to the consumer & cleverly works in Netflix’s advantage too!

First Netflix began offering a “Watch Instantly” option from their website. Users were allowed a certain amount of hours per month to watch streaming movies to their PC for free. Netflix realized very quickly that this feature resulted in the shipment of less movies to their consumers because they were watching more movies on-line. The costs for Netflix to offer live streaming videos versus mailing movies was significantly less & they quickly removed any maximum on the amount of viewing hours they offered to their users in hopes that the number of shipments required would continue to drop while usership would continue to rise.

Netflix also just announced a deal with Microsoft to stream movies directly to a user’s Xbox 360 game console. It obvious that Netflix is looking to offer their consumers as many options as possible to view movies as long as it doesn’t involve shipping that movie to the consumer. Again, the rationale being that as more users view their movies on-line, the less likely they are to order their movies through the mail & the net result is higher margins & ultimately more profits for Netflix.

Each day I imagine more things that companies can do with technologies to save their company time, money, & resources. One of my greatest pleasures at work is seeing so many companies actively taking advantages of the technologies that we & Jaduka have developed to save money & improve their business processes with communications.

Brian Kirk
VP Business Development
NetworkIP & Jaduka