CTI Squared (CTI²) a leading provider of Value Added Services (VAS) with over 10 years experience in the Value Added Services industry was recently purchased by AudioCodes. In its early stages, CTI² developed a Unified Messaging solution for enterprises, and later shifted towards the Telecom market while leveraging on the knowledge gained with messaging and telephony. Currently, CTI² product lines offer Messaging, Conferencing and additional advanced services. This article serves to introduce the CTI² offering.

Value Added Services (VAS) is a well-known telecommunication industry term for “non-core services”, referring mainly to all the services over and above standard voice calls. In the past two decades, VAS proved their added value to the standard service offering and drove up ARPU with services such as Voicemail, Ring-tones, Fun Greetings, Empty Call Capture, SMS/MMS and many more applications.

CTI² currently offers five product lines, targeting various types of Service Providers and networks such as Cable, WiMAX, Mobile, and Wireline. These product lines provide specific offerings for each market segment that includes Messaging, Conferencing, Advanced Media Solutions, T-Commerce and W-Commerce. All services are developed on CTI²’s InTouch platform, which is a scalable and Telco-grade solution that seamlessly integrates within the Service Provider environment.

Commercial Installations

CTI² commercial global installations have proven that InTouch is one of the few platforms available today that is able to deliver services to both small and large operators while providing cutting-edge solutions for the marketplace. Examples of such installations are Bezeq in Israel and FASTWEB in Italy.

Bezeq is the national fixed-line provider in Israel, supporting over 2.9 million lines. CTI² has replaced the legacy voicemail systems of Comverse and Nortel enabling Bezeq to offer new attractive services while significantly reducing their operating costs. Bezeq offers its subscribers applications such as Voicemail, Visual Voicemail, Fax to Email and Voice to Email services.

FASTWEB is the second largest fixed-line provider in Italy, supporting over 1.1 million subscribers. FASTWEB is a Triple-Play provider offering Television, Data, Internet and Telephony services over Broadband. FASTWEB is offering Unified Messaging supporting voice, fax and email to its subscribers with a special IPTV implementation, which includes notification of new message on the TV and special client for message retrieval using the TV.

CTI²'s Product Lines in Brief

Messaging Solutions

Messaging solutions allow Service Providers to offer subscribers the convenience of receiving, accessing, responding and managing of all their messages (voice, video, fax and email) through a single mailbox, while increasing call completion rate on the telephony network.

The primary InTouch messaging solutions are:

• OPENVoicemail – a standard voicemail service that incorporates enhanced features such as callback and SMS notifications.
   
• VoicemailPLUS – an OPENVoicemail that includes visual access to a mailbox via Web, IPTV and mobile applications. The visual access enables subscribers to navigate between their messages prior to listening to them, effortless mailbox set up and more.
   
• Unified Messaging – provides a unified mailbox of voice, fax and email with visual access to all types of messages. Unified Messaging enables the monitoring of email messages via a telephone and rule mechanism for advanced message management including a variety of lucrative features.

In addition to the primary messaging solutions, CTI² has several services that target niche and emerging markets, such as,

CTI² also provides messaging solutions in a hosted model, enabling Service Providers to offer SOHO and SMBs to host their messaging services while supplying delegated administration and grouping features.

These value added services broaden the Service Provider portfolio, adding opportunities to attract additional market segments and increases the ARPU. Some of them are:

• Auto Attendant – a multi-tenant solution that supplements or replaces live operators in IP Centrex environments
   
• Record Your Call – enables subscribers to record their calls and receive the recorded file to their email address
   
• Ring Back Tones - provides subscribers with capabilities to replace the standard ring back tone with a song, or music that they prefer
   
• Click to Call - enables subscribers to invoke a call through a boomerang call from their mobile phones by their preferred Service Provider

Conferencing

Conferencing services offer a conferencing solution for both the residential and enterprise markets. Conferencing services support a high volume of simultaneous conference calls with a large number of attendees. CTI² supports two types of conferences:

• Voice Conferencing – Scheduled or ad-hoc conference calls via the telephone. This service includes Web portals for scheduling, updating and managing conferences and for on-line conference moderation. The service has a feature-rich suite of options (e.g. lecture mode, on the fly adding of new subscribers, roll out and more).
   
• Video Conferencing – Enhances the voice conference with video. This service is planned for Q4 2007.

• IPTV Advertisement – Automatically connects a buyer with a seller driven by location-based advertisement on the TV screen. While viewing the advertisement, the audience (potential buyers) can click the remote control for contacting the advertiser. This service initiates a call to the viewer’s home and connects him or her to the advertiser.
   
• Content Promotion – Automatic notification of premium TV content. Content Promotion notifies the available premium content and encourages usage by subscribers. The subscribers can define their criteria for desirable content profiles while receiving notifications for the preferred content.

W-Commerce

Click to Call - Enhancing the Pay-Per-Click advertisement model by enabling more advanced and richer communication methods. Click to Call converts static advertisements to interactive ones, enabling the seller to identify which method should be implemented to ensure the buyer’s call to action. Click to Call is a revenue generator for Service Providers as it increases airtime usage and generates on the fly pre-paid accounts. Click to Call targets several market segments, including Yellow Pages, bulletin boards, corporate commercials, corporate Web sites (contact us/customer support), portals, and more.

The InTouch Platform

The InTouch platform is an infrastructure designed by CTI² for the InTouch suite of services. This platform is a service creation environment, enabling Service Providers to launch a suite of services on a single platform.

The InTouch platform is a Telco-grade platform that meets the strict demands of Service Providers such as high availability and redundancy. Its design enables the providing of solutions for TDM, VoIP and hybrid networks, scaling from few thousands to millions of subscribers, and advanced OAMP and customization tools.

In summary, CTI² provides a dynamic environment for Service Providers to gain a marketing edge for the stiff competition in the Telecoms market.