MOMENTUM TELECOM ACQUIRES COMMPARTNERS
Acquisition of VoIP Provider Expands Momentum’s Business to More than 100,000 Lines and Offers Additional Geo-Redundancy through Added Facilities
Birmingham, Ala. – May 6, 2011 – Momentum Telecom, the leading provider of private label digital voice services and broadband management to cable operators, municipalities, and managed services providers throughout the U.S., has announced today that it has acquired CommPartners – a VoIP services provider based in Las Vegas – through an asset liquidation process resulting from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Momentum was the highest bidder of several companies considering the acquisition of CommPartners’ assets.
“Our management team identified an excellent opportunity to acquire the assets of another digital voice provider for financially favorable terms, giving us the ability to grow our customer base, leverage significant core technology assets to the advantage of current and future customers, and continue building leadership in this space,” said Alan Creighton, chief executive officer of Momentum. “We have invested heavily in the supporting applications and processes to scale our hosted IP telephony business, putting Momentum in a perfect position to acquire smaller companies that need capital infusions to continue servicing customers.”
CommPartners currently supports approximately 200 reseller customers and more than 27,000 hosted seats and SIP trunks. At its peak, the company reported annual revenues of $77 million. CommPartners has primarily serviced data VARs and other resellers that provide hosted IP telephony to small and medium-sized businesses, closely mirroring Momentum’s focus on providing hosted solutions to cable company and municipality subscribers throughout the U.S.
“As a Momentum Telecom customer for more than two years, we can vouch for the company’s advanced technical features that greatly reduce unnecessary complexities for providing digital voice service,” said Tenzin Gyaltsen, Cable Television Director at City of San Bruno. “We are conscious of cost, voice quality and access to technical customer service teams, and Momentum Telecom has proven to be a very good partner on all accounts.”
CommPartners will be absorbed into Momentum and be rebranded as details of the ownership change are worked out. The Las Vegas office will remain open and Momentum will maintain CommPartners’ core IP infrastructure and later integrate CommPartners’ platform with Momentum’s platform which is currently hosted in Atlanta, GA. Sales support, account management, Tier 2 and Tier 3 technical support will be maintained in Las Vegas to create a strong regional presence. Momentum has been delivering hosted IP telephony service since 2005 and is CLEC certified in 45 states, and with the acquisition now exceeds 100,000 lines – making it one of the largest wholesale providers of digital IP telephony services.
“We are already in the process of moving quickly to contact CommPartners’ customers, introduce ourselves and ensure they know we are assuming all current contracts and agreements,” said Sarah Pieri, Momentum’s director of sales and marketing. “And we are looking forward to introducing these customers to Momentum’s custom web portal that automates many of the most tedious and problematic tasks – such as provisioning – as well as access to our own proprietary analytics tools for verifying and measuring voice quality, a solution that will greatly enhance their service experience.”
For Momentum’s existing customers, with the current Atlanta-based colocation providing multiple layers of redundancy – and operating at the highest levels of availability – adding additional measures of backup in the western half of the U.S. is advantageous. The addition of CommPartners’ Broadsoft platform in Las Vegas enables Momentum to deliver a carrier class level of geo-redundancy.
About Momentum
Momentum provides independent cable operators, municipalities and managed services providers throughout the U.S. private label residential and business digital voice solutions and the most comprehensive operational and managed support services for broadband and voice available. Momentum delivers reliability, quality and a lower total cost of ownership through the industry’s first integrated platform of superior quality voice delivery and broadband management. For more information, please visit www.momentumwholesale.com.
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THE LATEST FROM MOMENTUM: 2010 REVIEW
Today is Thursday and it is quiet around the office. I am reflecting on 2010 and what a good year it has been. It has been a very busy year for both the Momentum Team and our Cable Operator and Municipality partners. We view 2010 as a major quality foundation year that will reap partner rewards for years to come.
Some of our 2010 major headlines are captured here:
MOMENTUM CREATES NEW OSS NETWORK SURVEILLANCE AND PROVISIONING SYSTEM FOR VOICE AND BROADBAND SERVICES
MORE
MOMENTUM TELECOM UNVEILING QUALITY INITIATIVE AS PART OF NEW VOICE SUPPORT ECOSYSTEM FOR CABLE OPERATORS AND MUNICIPALITIES
MORE
MOMENTUM BOOSTS TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP TEAMS WITH INDUSTRY EXPERTS
MORE
While we worked through each of these major initiatives, our sales team added over 20 new partners this year! We also now manage cable operator broadband infrastructures and provide Tier I, II & III support. Our latest customer, Southern Coastal, subscribes to all of Momentum’s services and moved to us on December 15, 2010 – Welcome!
We have seen great success with our new Broadband Management offering. Our operators are selecting robust tools for integrated Voice and Broadband Monitoring, Provisioning and ISP Services, in addition to quality Managed Tier 1 – 3 Voice, Broadband and NOC support, all at a lower cost per subscriber.
Since we began our quality focus at the beginning of 2010, our network availability has been optimized with an uptime of 99.996% for the year. You should now be receiving monthly reports from our new quality analytics system – giving you insight into your specific network and carrier statistics and allowing you to provide advanced business services with Service Level Agreement (SLA) measurement capabilities.
We hope you are having a wonderful holiday and we wish you continued success in 2011. I also hope you enjoyed the Dancing Deer brownies and cookies as much as I did (somebody has to taste test!).
Alan
The Latest from Momentum
Hello, It’s been awhile since we last posted to Voice Matters. Why? We have been busy developing some major new services!
Wednesday we launched a new, fully integrated operations support system (OSS) and managed services offering. We now deliver an integrated voice and broadband management platform, reasonable pricing, and intuitive service analytics to support the most advanced businesses. This new suite of services includes web-based software to provision, manage, and monitor cable modem and emta devices. Our managed services solution provides a 24/7 Help Desk and Network Operations Center (NOC) support. And, these services are available for a significantly lower cost than our competition!
More about Momentum’s Operational Support System (MOSS)
Question: Why have we developed and deployed “MOSS” and managed services?
Answer: We determined only about 1 out of every 4 trouble tickets are Momentum issues. The others should either be handled by Tier 1 representatives or are tied to network and end point device problems that were difficult to diagnose without full visibility. With MOSS, we can quickly identify and resolve voice and broadband issues – a resource you will not find with other voice providers.
Question: How can MOSS help me?
Answer: Voice service is only as good as the network it’s on. When a voice or fax application runs across a poor network, voice problems normally occur and fax doesn’t stand a chance. With MOSS, all support staff have visibility into the carrier’s network, Momentum’s network and your network. This will help everyone diagnose and treat subscriber issues quickly and easily.
Question: Why Managed Services?
Answer: Our Managed Services can be structured to fit your needs. A same-platform, integrated portal gives us the tools we need to quickly identify and resolve subscriber issues. Leverage our 9+ years of Tier 1 support experience, or just use our new analytics tools to provide a better quality of experience to your subscribers.
Question: How are we doing on quality?
Answer: Momentum’s core network has an availability of over five 9’s this year! We are delivering Carrier-grade service so you can provide the most advanced business solutions.
So, right about now you probably want more details. See our release here and talk to one of our Sales Managers for additional information. We’ll also be at the NCTC, so stop by for a demo.
Sorry for the long thread, but if you’ve made it this far…thanks for reading!
Alan
Survey Says…
We recently conducted a reseller satisfaction survey to help us identify our strengths as well as where we need to focus our 2010 improvement efforts. Thank each of you for your valuable feedback.
Feedback Results
Our strengths:
- Ensuring technical support availability is there when you need it
- Offering innovative product solutions
- Providing accurate and reliable billing
- Delivering excellent marketing support
Areas we need to improve:
- Providing tools to monitor voice/network quality
- Developing account assistance training and implementation tools to help you become proficient in delivering a quality voice product
- Becoming more knowledgeable about your business
- Improving reseller/subscriber portal speed and ease-of-use
New turn-key products requested:
- Provisioning/Device Configuration
- Audio/Web Conferencing
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Based on your feedback, here are our top 2010 projects:
- Managed Voice: We have a number of tools planned for introduction in 2010 to provide managed end-to-end voice quality monitoring for resellers.
- Website improvement: Our focus is to increase speed and improve usability on our websites.
- Additional features and services: Automated provisioning, account/authorization codes and advanced conferencing to name a few.
- Operator support: We are developing new training programs, assistance with business sales campaigns, and reducing total issue resolution time.
The 2009 satisfaction survey really helped us define value from your perspective and helped clarify our product roadmap for 2010. We plan an annual survey to help us gauge and continually improve service satisfaction and our goal is to achieve excellent ratings on the next questionnaire.
Finally, we are happy to announce the large majority of our resellers would highly recommend us to another reseller. Thank you!
Goodbye 2009 – Hello 2010!
Even though 2009 has been called the worst year of the worst US decade, it was a great year for VoIP. Here are some recent industry forecasts and highlights posted by FierceVoip:
1. According to Infonetics, SIP trunking service revenue is expected to have an 89 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013!
2. Frost and Sullivan surveyed 3,662 decision makers in small- and medium-sized business as well as enterprises in various parts of the world, and found 44 percent had deployed some form of Unified Communications already.
3. According to an ABI Unified Communications Research report, uptake is on a ‘steeply rising curve.’ ABI’s report predicted UC spending would rise from $302 million in 2008 to $4.2 billion by 2013.
Top 2009 Acquisitions – VoIP on Sale
Avaya buys Nortel ES
Google buys Gizmo5
Skype founders buy Skype
Acme Packet buys Covergence
KPN buys iBasis
Cisco buys Tandberg
Momentum’s 2009 highlights:
1. We successfully migrated thousands of lines from our vCentrix acquisition and new partner accounts.
2. We experienced a 260% wholesale line growth in 2009 and now have over 145 cable operator and municipality partners throughout the U.S.
3. We enhanced/launched a range of advanced business products to our partners.
We will be offering new products and programs during 2010 – and expect this year to be even more successful!
Are you leaving millions on the table?
Cablevision captures majority of residential wireline market!
Some of their highlights:
“Almost 80% of our high-speed data customers subscribe to our voice service, a testament to the success of our bundling initiatives over the last few years…we are now the majority voice provider in the residential wireline marketplace, having displaced the legacy Bell System providers. We see no reason why we won’t achieve the same success in the business marketplace.”
Cablevision’s market share success story shows the potential revenue at stake. Just think of the additional revenue in the residential voice market if your company achieves Cablevision’s penetration rates. We want to help you, the independent cable operators and municipalities, become the leading voice provider in your market. It is only a matter of time and drive. Your services are more advanced, more competitive and better supported than your competition.
Many of you have already achieved similar penetration rates by focusing on the following:
1. High quality core switching network, carrier network, and WAN/CMTS
2. Great bundle options and promotions
3. Excellent support
Bell’s bread and butter is stale! Hone your acquisition skills with superior offers and services. As your customers become better educated about their options, we are confident you will ultimately win the battle of the bundle.
Alan
Now We’re Talking
Introducing our new blog.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed when trying to stay up-to-date with everything relevant to our industry. Scouring the web is time consuming. That’s where we come in. Whenever someone on my team finds something we consider new and notable, we will share it immediately with our partners. This includes sales tips, successful campaigns, partner highlights, industry and product trends, and Momentum initiatives. Of course this won’t be your one-stop-shop for everything “communications”, but a little bit of update information and a few industry highlights from your voice partner could save you some time.
Stay tuned-in.
Alan
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