The drive to Amiba

The Amiba Cloud PBX can be deployed with re-seller branding immediately with no development lead time. The main competitive advantages are:

System Administrator training on Asterisk is intensive and has significant manpower cost. Amiba is intuitive, user friendly and feature-rich.
Tightly integrated Smartphone apps
All of the rich features of a traditional CPE PBX
Integrated contact centre option
Video collaboration options
No Development Costs
No Maintenance Costs
No Capex for infrastructure investment
No hardware obsolescence
Reduced floor space requirements in the LAN closet along with reduced air-conditioning and energy costs.
Smartphone Apps
The tightly integrated Amiba Smartphone apps for iPhone and Android can easily be be re-branded to accommodate re-seller branding and presence. This allows the re-seller to deliver a branded, customized, fully functional system phone on modern tablets and smartphone devices rather than relying on the limited functionality of generic third party apps

Move up to a fully featured PBX system
Many Asterisk implementations cover only the basics of Call Hold and Transfer. Amiba Cloud PBX offers the full range of rich PBX functionality such as Auto-Attendant, Call –Recording, Conferencing, Call Centre, Voicemail to email messaging and many more. See the full list in the annex. The basic offering includes a comprehensive set of licenses: – desktop phone, softphone, mobile, presence, tele–working, call minutes. This simplifies the sales process to the end-user. With over 700,000 deployments, most individual requirements have already been built into the platform.

Close support from the Amiba Development team
The Amiba development team provide close support and a 24/7 online trouble ticketing system with many years experience of supporting demanding industry leadering operators such as KPN (Netherlands), Belgacom and eircom.

Background
The Cloud is increasingly gaining acceptance of as a resilient & efficient delivery platform.

It is now feasible to offer pure software based products to end-users that would have been inconceivable even five years ago.

When coupled with improving connectivity trends, an opportunity now exists to provide IP-PBX services in the cloud.

Whilst there is no technical reason why the traditional one-off sale approach should not be used, this type of service is better served by the more attractive Opex model.

However a key advantage of cloud over customer premises equipment is that no upgrade of hardware is required to run new features such as collaboration.

This requirement becomes more critical once Value-Added services such as voice, DSL are added to the mix and ancillary Services such as Recordings, Conference calls.

The ICT Re-seller may offer the following options to the end-user

Cloud PBX service
Cloud PBX plus bundled Voice & Data Services.
Add-ons such as inclusive minutes, call-recording, conference calls are available to provide a more compelling consumer offering.
Business IP phones can be sold as a once off, or included in a rental
The Re-seller owns the end customer and is responsible for sales customer training and tier 1 support. Amiba is responsible for, Provisioning and Tier 2 Support.

Amiba has relationships with the ITPS for breakouts and can, if required, supply

– Cloud based IP-BPX with Smartphone Apps

– Minutes on a wholesale basis

– White-label Cloud based CRM/Billing

Self Service Cloud marketplace.
The evolution of this business model is towards full self service where the end-user could

Enter all the company/payment/technical details upfront
select the type of service they require
pay their money
press ‘go’.
The auto-provisioning would create an instance of IP-PBX, point the end-user to the PBX and have the service up and running in 10 minutes.

Options offered might be:

IP-BPX only Retail – end-user already has SIP-Trunking in place
IP-PBX + Voice Retail – Amiba supply the voice also in that territory
IP-PBX + Voice + Billing For the virtual Re-seller
Business IP phones could be dispatched automatically from a third party logistics facility.

The functional-areas below are all integral parts of the solution, but can be turned on/off as required.

Sales
Staff will have visibility of all sales, leads, tickets, invoices in a single system.

The type of functionality is similar to that offered in generic CRM systems such as Sage-CRM, Salesforce, MS-Dynamics.

Provisioning
When a sale is made, then all software & infrastructure required to fulfil the service will be automatically provisioned based on the products selected during the sale.

As part of the Service provisioning, all account information, Products and pricing are set up in Billing (which in turn causes the back-office to be populated). At this point in time, the customer is live and has access to the portal.

Billing
All account and billing information is entered at sign-up automatically or manually, or via web-service API calls from external systems involved.

Billing’s main tasks are

To ensure all One-Off, Pro-rata and Recurring charges are set up correctly.
To Rate all usage records correctly
Ensure balances / Payments maintained.
Dispatch actual invoices
Make all such information available to the customers, Back-office and internal staff as necessary.
CRM
CRM is becoming more and more important as trading conditions continue to be tough. It’s easier to keep a customer than win a new one, this is especially important in a recurring revenue Opex model.

In short, CRM is all about communication and transparency/visibility.

Internal staff have 360 degree visibility of everything that happens at an account level. This includes Sales-Orders, Trouble-Tickets, Invoice-history, All-services (live and ceased), all Tariffs, all communications to/from the customer etc.

A sub-set of the above is externalized and made visible to the end-user.

Payment Gateway
Interfacing to several payment gateways is available, including Realex.

System Components
The following are the high level components involved in the solution.

From an end-user perspective, the overall solution is seen as a single product, but is comprised of the following.

IP-PBX
Softphones and Smart-Phone apps
Conference rooms
Contact Centre
Video collaboration
Control software & portals
End-user Portal
Emailed PDF and/or Printed Invoices
SIP Trunking