TPN Expands to Europe

The vast majority of UCaaS offerings are restricted to a single country. Thinking Phone Networks (TPN) has been building traction with some international accounts, and today formally launched its expansion into Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Additionally, the firm opened a European headquarters office in Amsterdam headed by Ronald Rubens. Rubens has held executive positions with Avaya, CosmoCom, and NEC.

Thinking Phone Networks is one of the few UCaaS solutions that primarily targets larger enterprises - many of which are multinational corporations. The company's ThinkingSuite software platform is a cloud communications solution with applications that span IP voice, mobility, video, analytics, presence, messaging, contact center, and conferencing.

"Increasingly, distributed organizations expect richer communications and collaborative functions so information and ideas can be shared, and decisions made, more quickly, and organizations can be more agile," according to 'Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Unified Communications, Steve Cramoysan, September 21, 2012.' Enterprises, organizations and users are attracted by the potential of UC to deliver productivity benefits at a user level. They see the possibility of achieving business benefits at a team or enterprise-wide level by offering better customer support and reducing latency in business processes."

While cloud adoption in the UC has been very aggressive, it's not as popular in Europe. Thinking Phones reports its pricing in Europe is overall competitive with its U.S. offers, and the firm believes that the same drivers in the U.S. will accelerate demand overseas. Specifically, desire for enhanced communication solutions that foster collaboration; ability to address activity latency and make companies more agile; and the desire to lower overall communications costs.

The announcement better positions Thinking Phone Networks to accommodate multinational enterprises that want a single vendor to provide UC internationally. In terms of hosted UC, the majority of European providers are carriers, and Thinking Phone Networks believes it offers a service that better meets enterprise end-user requirements. Thinking Phone Networks offers its customers (and distribution channels) an integrated end-to-end cloud solution, advanced analytics, web services APIs, and a complete backend toolkit to manage deployments.

Related: The State of Hosted UC (2011)