A new conferencing service wholesaler called Audio- Ex is positioning itself as the low-cost leader in audio and Web conferencing.
“We’re trying to be the Southwest Airlines of the conferencing business,” says Dana Bruttig Simons, founder and CEO of Audio-Ex, which launched service earlier this year and had its official coming out party at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo this March in Las Vegas.
While it’s up to the reseller to decide on the price end users pay for the conferencing services, Audio-Ex provides its AudioPoint bundled audio and Web conferencing services to resellers at between 4 cents and 8 cents per minute, depending on volume. There’s plenty of competition out there from conferencing giants AT&T, Genesys, Global Crossing and Premiere Conferencing as well as smaller operations, Simons says, but many of Audio-Ex’s larger competitors have “huge cost structure baggage because of huge debts on their balance sheets, so it’s hard for them to match us” on price.
Marc Beattie, senior analyst at conferencing market research firm Wainhouse Research LLC, says in 2003, the average retail price worldwide for attended audio conferencing was 25.5 cents per minute; the average worldwide retail price for unattended audio conferencing was 10.7 cents per minute; and the average retail price for Web conferencing ranged from 10 cents to 45 cents per minute. “So imagine an average customer spending 10 cents a minute on unattended audio plus another 20 cents for Web conferencing,” says Beattie, adding that very large users such as GE that buy in volume pay about 4 cents per minute for audio conferencing services.
That said, Audio-Ex is well-placed in the marketplace, says Beattie, who notes there are about 250 conferencing service providers worldwide, not including resellers. Beattie adds that in addition to its low-cost pricing, Audio-Ex offers resellers a one-source connection for both audio and Web conferencing services.
Resellers typically have to go through separate wholesalers for audio conferencing and Web conferencing today, he says. “They appear to be going after existing competitors, they’re not trying to increase the size of the market,” adds Beattie.
Current Audio-Ex customers include Conference Call Connections of Florida; Interleave; OneSource Telecom in Southern California; TexLink Communications, which sells voice and data services to small and medium businesses in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio; and long-distance service provider USA Interconnect.
Resellers of Audio-Ex’s reservationless audio service and Web conferencing service — which Simons says the company throws in at no extra change — have access to a variety of back-end functions. For example, Web-based online provisioning offered by Audio-Ex enables resellers and their end users to do online provisioning, and allows resellers to download call detail records or PDFs for billing purposes, she says. Resellers can brand the services as they wish, says Simons, adding “we are a complete whitelabel shop.”
In addition to using the Audio-Ex Web portal for billing and provisioning, Simons says master agents also can use it to see what their agents are doing and calculate commissions.
“We try to make it hassle-free by using a Web portal,” she says.
Audio-Ex also provides all agents and resellers with marketing collateral and a 30-day sales force training course.
Next on Audio-Ex’s agenda is the introduction of VoIP service.
Simons says Voyant (now Polycom) owns 58 percent marketshare for audio conferencing bridges. Now, Voyant has introduced a VoIP bridge so once IP phones become mainstream, customers will be able to receive voice service and conferencing from a single provider.
