SevenLayer – Voice in the Cloud

Or at least that is what the folks atSevenLayer think. SevenLayer is latest company to be incubated inArchitel Labs. Headed by Jeff Rothell, the company delivers cloud based voice applications to small and medium sized companies. Prior to co-founding Sevenlayer, Jeff built two multi-million dollar telecommunication companies. From 1999 to 2002 he served as President and CEO of Netvoice Technologies, a publicly traded (NTVT) telecommunications business operating hosted VoIP services in 52 major U.S. markets. Then in 2003 he co-founded CentricVoice, a venture-backed telecommunications company offering trunk replacement to small and medium sized businesses. Most recently Jeff served as COO of Unified360, one of the largest Cisco-powered voice vendors in the Southwest.

In the United States there are thousands of phone vendors selling hardware-based phone systems to small and medium-sized companies. Despite the advent of hosted voice options, the number of phone systems sold in the U.S. continues to increase. Business owners throughout the U.S. seem to want to own the hardware powering their phones. On the other hand they want ALL of the features that hosted solutions can offer at affordable prices. SevenLayer’s offering is designed to create a recurring revenue model for phone vendors, while offering business owners the features they demand without competing with their primary offering – selling phone systems.

Last month, SevenLayer launched what they call their Intelligent Voice Cloud, powered by their AVAS platform, and began offering live features including:

• Recording – a key application for call centers, financial services, healthcare and real estate. Formerly an expensive feature to acquire much less manage, can be offered as an add on service delivered from the cloud with no heavy upfront costs to implement, while making tracking, management and storage of recordings easy and secure.
• Conferencing – moving conferencing to the cloud may seem excessive, but in doing so an enterprise can leverage the power of our IVC conference scheduler allowing easy access to your address book. Imagine being able to schedule a meeting at a specific time and instead of having to remember to dial in, the IVC will dial each party at the appropriate time.
• Business Continuity – the greatest weakness of premises based features is the premises itself. In the event of a service disruption the cloud-based IVC can guarantee 100% uptime on inbound calls by automatically re-routing calls to alternative landlines or mobile numbers.

In the coming months SevenLayer will release a full suite of features and applications accessible to any small business through the click of a mouse.