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Backoffice & OSS
CTI Ready to Make Mark in U.S.
Communications Management Provider Launches Product Line at Telecom ‘05
by Jim Barthold
CTI Group is using Telecom ’05 in Las Vegas as its launching pad for an enhanced integrated telecommunications platform, Proteus Enterprise that it’s aiming at the U.S enterprise market.
“In a nutshell, CTI group provides insights for enterprises into their telecommunications spending and we deliver bills online for leading service providers, including Sprint,” said Sid Rao, CTI’s chief product architect. “We’re doing a full-fledged marketing rollout of Proteus for our U.S. customers.”
Those customers include the U.S. government, some leading high tech firms and financial institutions such as Wachovia, all of whom have been involved in product testing “to make sure that the product is truly suited to the United States’ culture and technological needs and we definitely needed to establish feasibility and validation with leading customers,” Rao said.
There are significant differences between international markets, where CTI has been operating in more than 40 counties and the U.S. International customers are more wireline-oriented and more focused on transaction logging built around phones and basic telecommunications usage.
“In the U.S. things have definitely taken a slant more towards collaboration. There’s more of a wireless spin on things from the perspective of content and content delivery to wireless devices,” Rao said. “They traditionally use tools like Proteus to better understand the financial implications of using certain vendors over other vendors and optimizing the topology of their network services and architecture for enterprise usage.”
While the platform targets the enterprise, CTI’s sales force will target a much wider customer base, Rao said. The company sells to PBX vendors and has relationships with companies such as Siemens, Nortel and Avaya and “secondarily, we have relationships with service providers and carriers who resell our solutions along with their IP PBX and PBX services.”
At that level, he said, “we’ve established a relationship with one of the top three service providers in the Southeastern United States that provides wireless and wireline services and they’ll be bundling our product with one of their offerings.”
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