Unified Communications Featured Article

TPx Strengthens Offering by Joining TrustedSky

By Alicia Young
Web Editor

TPx, a premier managed services carrier, announced recently that it has joined TrustedSky, an association made up of service providers in the cloud and unified communications (UC) market. Through this partnership, TPx will be making TrustedSky Beacon software available to its agent partners. The hope is that this software will give partners access to on-target, comprehensive answers to their customers’ needs for UC solutions.

TrustedSky’s self-service Web-based assessment tool in particular should prove to be especially useful. The tool can be used to test and diagnose network conditions to assist hosted unified communication-as-a-service (UCaaS) customers in identifying network capability and quality. According to the announcement, members of the alliance, along with their partners, are given access to this portfolio of Web-based tools to streamline the provisioning process for the deployment of cloud-based communications solutions to help their employees and customers connect.

“The service is simple but powerful,” said Kerry Shih (News - Alert), developer of the software behind TrustedSky. “With the click of a link, users can temporarily turn their machine into a VoIP testing device that can send test calls to beacons installed in data centers. The test VoIP packets created by the end-user’s PC ride along the same path as a ‘real’ VoIP packet, traversing the entire network and recording the result. Based on this simple ‘pitch and catch’ test, TrustedSky lets the user know if they should call their IT department, their ISP and/or their hosted VoIP provider for assistance. This helps the end-user reach a quicker resolution, shortens the support cycle and keeps the hosted VoIP providers service queue to a minimum.”

As an added bonus, the self-service Web-based assessment tool complements the diagnostic and monitoring capabilities built into TPx’s UCx UC suite of products. The combination of these solutions should prove to be beneficial to TPx and its customers.

“We know that unified communications is more than a set of products for businesses today,” said Ken Bisnoff, senior vice president of strategic opportunities for TPx.  “It’s increasingly a mainstay of daily business operations that is central to customer satisfaction and competitive strength.  Making TrustedSky’s quick and powerful diagnostic and performance assessment tool available to our channel partners gives them another powerful resource they can use to build their positions as valued counselors and partners who can deliver the best UC solutions to their customers.”