Business analytics joins unified communications, collaboration, and file-sharing among PanTerra's service offerings.
Arthur Chang, PanTerra Networks’ CEO
Santa Clara-based unified cloud services provider PanTerra Networks has announced the availability of a Business Analytics offering, which combines unified communications (UC) analytics with content management analytics to provide real-time monitoring, reporting and adjustment to business processes in real-time.
PanTerra is the technology provider as well as the service provider, spending the first half of their existence building an ultra-reliable cloud infrastructure to deliver multiple cloud services for the mid-market.
“We focus on ultra-high service attributes, which means the infrastructure itself,” said Arthur Chang, PanTerra’s CEO. “We don’t believe you can deliver multiple services on a third party infrastructure, and give customers confidence they can depend on you. Not all functions need ultra-high reliability, but for those who want that, these big public clouds don’t run anywhere close to 5 nines.”
While PanTerra believes their infrastructure can satisfy any client, their core market is the mid-market.
“Our sweet spot is organizations in the hundreds to low thousands,” said Arthur Chang, PanTerra’s CEO. “From a solutions point of view, we can serve any market, but our marketing effort is on the mid-market. We do have some partners who serve the 25 and under market, but we as a company don’t focus on it. We especially target companies who are multi-location or distributed in some way, like franchise models. That’s where we really shine, in those environments where the IT resource is typically only at the centre.”
PanTerra sells primarily through the channel.
“We have always focused on the channel because it is the dominant go to market for mid-market enterprises,” Change said. “We initially started out on the lower end of the mid-market – more SMB – and have since moved upmarket. We augment the channel with a small direct sales force to cover any areas where we don’t have channel presence.” They have several hundred partners, mainly VARs, but also master agents and agents, and the solution is also available wholesale as a private label offering.
PanTerra started their service offerings with unified communications, then added collaboration to it, and earlier this year added file-sharing.
“We offer them as a unified solution for UC collaboration and communications-enabled content management, or a la carte, across both desktop and mobile devices,” Chang said. “What we are announcing now is a framework for doing business analytics across that complete environment.”
The solution provides analytics on any user, group, call queue or file. It also provides detailed reporting, as well as tailored notifications, so companies can gain real insight into how the business is operating.
“We are not trying to be an analytics company,” Chang said. “We are offering analytics on the content we are managing. We have built an engine and tools that allow you to do this in real time, and set up performance metrics to permit better utilization of all the stored data you have with us. It’s a tool very specific for our content.”
Chang said that the most obvious candidate for communications analytics is the contact centre and call center market.
“Between 30 and 40 per cent of our customers use our call centre functionality, and that’s where the low hanging fruit is for communications analytics,” he said. “For instance, an organization can set an ideal maximum time an agent can spend serving a customer, and then monitor the amount of time on the phone, and immediately inform a supervisor if the call goes long so they can listen in. The supervisor can then whisper suggestions to agent or even break in to solve the customer issue. This kind of functionality has been available in expensive solutions, but this brings it to a different class of customer.”
Chang said that PanTerra continues to look for new solutions to add, and is particularly interested in developing uniform back-end service solutions, like analytics, billing, security, and administration.
“Companies we sell to want these to be uniform,” he said. “This is something our customers have been asking for.”
