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Aretta (News - Alert) Communications provides telephony in the cloud.

The company launched in September 2007, and now has over a thousand customers around the world.

The idea was to move data from data centers located in dark, cramped closets to hosting in a data center, featuring an Asterisk (News - Alert) platform.

“It really started to take off,” said Aretta President Marc Fribush (News - Alert).

The company’s founders have extensive technology and financial backgrounds. Its core customers include many small- to medium-sized businesses.

 “We had to be a one-stop shop for this,” Fribush said. “We put together the whole package.”

Among Aretta’s products are NetPBX Pro and NetPBX Pro Complete – which are believed to be the most advanced hosted Asterisk systems available.

NetPBX Complete has unlimited calling (priced per-channel) to the US48 and Canada. Both Pro and Pro Complete feature upgrades to the NetPBX Free offering including more channels, SSH access, and advanced features in call recording and voicemail recording.

The company has several data centers, which are optimized for telecom application hosting.

Often, small businesses find that building and managing a secure, high performance, redundant network can be difficult and expensive.

Aretta says that by moving an Asterisk server off of an office network and into the Aretta datacenter will dramatically improve system uptime and place the telecom server directly on the Level3 backbone – the optimal scenario for Asterisk hosting.

Aretta’s technology platform features Asterisk Open Source PBX (News - Alert). Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, and provides many features that are often associated with high end proprietary PBXs. Asterisk supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment.

Under development since 1999, Asterisk is free, open source software. Currently boasting over 2 million users, Asterisk supports a wide range of telephony protocols.

Asterisk has been adopted by call centers around the world based on its flexibility. Call center and contact center developers have built complete ACD systems based on Asterisk.

Aretta provides its services through a few methods:

Direct sales

The Reseller method, where the brand becomes your own.

The ITSP, where customers can buy software from the company. It will be able to run in one of their data centers.

There has been a lot of demand for their products and services. It’s been popular with companies who have employees who work out of their house or at district offices. The phone number appears to the caller as if it’s just another company extension.

Among the businesses using Aretta’s technology are many call centers and debt collectors. They can make as many as 15,000 to 20,000 calls a day with the technology.

There is also a growing partnership program. Aretta partners have:

Dedicated sales, installation, and Tier 2 technical support

Competitive commissions, including one-time and residual payments

Customized product training

Partner portal full of tools and resources

Another potential option for the company is that they could employ any virtual approach not just telephony.

“We focused on telephony at this point but that’s one application,” says Aretta CEO Michael Rand.