In addition to outsourced customer support, IP Applications offers a full suite of other services— including a complete back office system.

by Jeff Goldman [November 10, 2004]

IP Applications was founded in 1998 after the Canadian ISP Hookup Communications went into receivership. According to Mark Sampson, IP Applications' President and CEO, the technology Hookup had created for its own needs was acquired by IP Applications' founders, who then used it to build a range of services designed for ISPs.

The company's aim, Sampson says, is to be the "service provider behind the service provider," offering services from billing to online account management. An ISP can choose to outsource all of its services to IP Applications and focus purely on marketing, or they can select one or two specific offerings and keep all others in house.

IP Applications (877) 604-7277 info@ipapp.com

In addition to ISPs, the company also targets affinity groups and other organizations. "As an example, we're talking to utilities that want to be able to do things like remote meter reading," Sampson says. "They can deploy a device that sits on the meter—and instead of sending someone to read each meter, they can do everything remotely over the Internet using our back office. Those are the types of things we're looking at."

IP Applications continues to seek out acquisitions to broaden its range of services. In September of this year, the company acquired the outsourced helpdesk provider Voyus, giving it a strong offering in that space. For years, Sampson says, IP Applications had partnered with Voyus to provide outsourced helpdesk services to its own customers, so when an opportunity came up to purchase the company, they took it.

With such a recent acquisition, Sampson says, the call center doesn't yet look very different from the way it did under Voyus—but he says changes are in the works. "As we begin to train people, these same people that provide services from a technical helpdesk capability will now be able to offer the services that we provide on the back end," he says.

Expanding the call center
For an ISP, that means a customer who calls in with a virus problem could be offered an outsourced anti-virus solution—or any of a range of similar products. "This gives us the ability to tie the solution together, so we're better; we're stronger in the marketplace," Sampson says. "We have both the back office and the front end, and we obviously want to be able to leverage both."

If an ISP wants to keep their own back office (or specific aspects of their own services) in combination with IP Applications' offering, Sampson says just about anything can be arranged. "We have quite a library of APIs," he says. "We haven't seen a billing system we can't write an interface to; we've got a huge library of application programming interfaces that allow us to talk to systems all over North America."

Currently, the Web interface used to monitor IP Applications' services is separate from Voyus's interface—though the two will soon be integrated, says Darren Dumba, the company's Executive Vice President of Sales and Business Development. "Instead of now having to log into two separate systems, they'll come into one interface and access everything they need to access about running their business," he says.

The two interfaces, Dumba adds, can provide access to a wide range of information. "In the extranet for the helpdesk, I can view all open trouble tickets, I can see my POP issues, I can see escalations—I have complete visibility, real time, into what's going on from a support perspective," he says. "If I go into our back office technology, I can see all the billing, all my business rules, and all my accounts."

Pricing for IP Applications's outsourced services is generally structured per subscriber. For the call center services, though, pricing can be per minute, per hour, per incident, or per subscriber. "We have flexibility not only in our technology but in our pricing models to give the customer a solution that best suits how they're going to market," Dumba says.

Customer-focused and forward-thinking
Jeff Erickson is Director of Operations for SourceNet Telecom, which provides ISP services to affinity groups, along with wireless phones and telecom services. The company began using Voyus for outsourced customer support about a year ago, and has stuck with the company through the IP Applications acquisition. "They've done an excellent job," he says.

It's been easy, Erickson says, for SourceNet to put their trust the customer support services they receive. "A lot of our clients put their own brand on the services that we provide, so it's really important to have the customer service be as proactive as possible in trying to satisfy the customer—and these guys really 'get' the customer service side of things," he says.

Steven Koles is General Manager of Netscape at AOL Canada, Inc. The company started working with IP Applications in 2003, specifically for back office services. "We built and launched our Netscape Online service offering in about 45 days," Koles says. "That was soup to nuts, including everything—and they were one of the shortest lead-times in terms of getting the platform up, configured, and ready to go."

The company maintains its own in-house call center, but uses IP Applications's services to maintain their billing and service provisioning. "From our perspective, that gave us the best bang for our buck in terms of moving quickly, in terms of time to market, and also having something that would scale," Koles says. "That was the decision we made, and it's been a relationship that's worked very well."

IP Applications's greatest strength, Koles says, lies in its beginnings as an ISP. "They understand our business," he says. "They understand the ISP space, they understand where the Internet is going—and instead of just milking a platform that was developed years ago, they're trying to evolve it and extend it to be useful for the next generation of what the Internet's going to look like. They're very forward-thinking."

— End

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Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart