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Shango Ups Roster and Operations as Demand for Its Fulfillment Orchestration Grows
11 Mar, 2013
AUSTIN, Texas, March 11, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shango, the operator of the only community-based marketplace for the fulfillment of IP-enabled services for communication service providers, today announced its plans to expand its standards-based ecosystem of voice applications service providers to include several additional categories of wholesale applications and providers. Coming on the heels of recent growth, the company's expansions are aimed at addressing growing demand, as well as the fundamental sourcing and supply chain fulfillment needs of carriers and service providers continually seeking a way to seamlessly integrate and unify communications offerings. When the company launched its cloud-based platform early last year to aid telephone number sourcing, activation and fulfillment, it quickly began to realize firsthand its carrier customers' deep desire to evolve the way they fulfilled their range of products, with the need to more effectively present new and existing services to wholesale channels. By the same token, service provider customers looked to the Shango platform to more easily source those carrier services and roll out their own new applications. What Shango saw was the need for unified communications supply chain integration, which led the company to accelerate its vision for a unified communications marketplace when it began to ramp up its software roadmap last fall. "The team knew that it would need to scale quickly to keep up with demand from customers for ways to orchestrate even more applications. We know the industry is evolving rapidly and we're seeing the proof right before our eyes within our marketplace," said Evin Hunt, CTO at Shango. "It's apparent with every new Shango customer that's loading in their native inventory for better management, each new request to manage their multiple third-party providers, and with every new reseller-facing portal set up in Shango for those desiring to more quickly provision and process large orders," he explains. Shango believes that the market's demand for a more seamless and transparent fulfillment process and customer experience is an evident and deeply rooted issue the industry is facing. The Shango marketplace today facilitates the order and fulfillment process of phone numbers and other applications for service providers through its common API and multi-tenancy capability, thus eliminating the need for manual swivel chair processes when putting together an IP-based offering. In fact, Shango is enabling carriers, operators and their service provider customers to pull through best-of breed, third-party applications, as well as manage and fulfill those orders, and present applications out to their customers in a seamless way. Amidst the rapid pace of development and early acceptance of the Shango marketplace amongst numerous industry leading service providers, the company brought in C. Enrique Ortiz last September as head of products to accelerate its product and SaaS development efforts. An industry-recognized mobile technologist bringing deep experience in product ideation, design, and development for a range of applications, Ortiz is effectively supporting the addition of several different application providers coming into the ecosystem. In December, Shango also brought in technology industry veteran, Jeffery Boozer, as Chief Operations Officer. Through his more than 25 years of experience in global business and sales strategy for emerging and rapidly transforming industries including telecom and cloud services, Jeff is escalating the company's ability to serve these markets through sustainable fulfillment solutions and extensive products. He is also building out the infrastructure and processes internally to manage the expansion in operational resources at Shango which are aimed at meeting its growing carrier and service provider customer needs. Since welcoming recent customers such as SimpleSignal and Vidtel into the marketplace, the company will continue to facilitate the growing demand for unified communications offerings by adding cloud-based applications service providers that offer audio and video conferencing, collaboration, SMS, as well as other emerging applications. The industry's desire to harness the changing role of the phone number from "a telephony enabler to an enabler of many voice applications is clear," feels Shango CEO, David Walsh, who also believes that the ability to tie that phone number to emerging IP-based features, applications and devices that can then be served out in a unified manner and seamlessly across value chains is what is drawing communications services providers to Shango. "Our initial focus was supply chain integration around phone numbers because we believe it's the key asset that links applications to the end user our customers are serving," he explains. "While today our customers are still managing their telephone number inventory and orchestrating their orders through Shango, we're seeing the phone number increasingly being tied to new offerings, which we believe represents a fundamental evolution in our industry, as well as evidence that business models will begin to shift more so towards delivering unified communications," he continues. Much like
Amazon.com lets vendors set up a store front and present inventory, and then handles order fulfillment through its back-end systems, Shango does the same thing for wholesale buyers and sellers of IP communications. Suppliers, or 'merchant members' as they are called in Shango. They put their inventory in the marketplace, and buyers can pick out the services and features they want through one point of integration. In its first year, Shango has facilitated over 5 million transactions across multiple voice and data applications for more than 1,400 trading partners. Shango marketplace members already include Tier 1 global telcos and other leading providers of DID and toll-free telephone numbers; CNAM, E911 and SMS features; hosted PBX and routing platforms; and even providers of cloud applications, as well as back office solutions, which are also part of the ever-expanding marketplace ecosystem. More at
www.shango.com
