At ITEXPO, Callis Communications Talks Wireless and the Cloud

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

At the recent ITEXPO event held in Miami earlier this year, TMC’s Erik Linask (News - Alert) took a moment to sit down with Dean Parker, CEO of unified communications company Callis Communications. Callis, which was recently acquired by telecom and wireless services company C Spire, delivers cloud-based unified communications to organizations throughout the Southeast U.S. The 14-year-old Callis (News - Alert)—currently in a growth period—specializes in hosted PBX solutions and cloud communications.

Linask asked what sort of organization the two companies are building once they put together the cloud communication element of the business with the significant wireless market share that C Spire controls.

“First of all, when you look at the root of what we’re all doing, we all need a fiber optic backbone, which C Spire owns in their geographical presence from Memphis to New Orleans to the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida. Number two, you’re going to need telephony, which we already have. Number three, you’re going to have to have a common vision. We found that many customers have moved away from the fragmentation. They got away from PBXs and local lines and long distance and Internet companies and brought all those companies into one.”

C Spire recently announced that it’s building the first tier-three data center in the Southeast, midway between Dallas and Atlanta. Parker notes that when you put all that together, you get virtualized servers, wireless phones and support for tablets – a particularly popular request among customers that want one bill instead of a fragmented telecom experience -- PBX (News - Alert) phones, Internet, e-mail and IT services, creating a one-stop shop for customers, complete with a high quality customer concierge service that aims to provide a top-drawer customer experience.

The cloud has been the catalyst for many companies to begin offering this type of one-stop shop services, said Parker, and it’s an important step to take to remain competitive. But beyond that, today’s telecom mergers should be based on common goals and values, rather than simply on revenue. Companies merging just to be the biggest often find they struggle to find relevance. In the telecom space, the goal should be to provide a broad array of services and the high quality customer support the marketplace demands. And today, they’re doing it via the cloud.

“New telecom has a name: it’s the cloud,” commented Parker. “Services today are still being provided, they’re just being provided in a different fashion.”