South African VoIP provider Saicom Voice Services has entered into partnership with pan-African telecoms enabler Seacom through which Seacom will provide VoIP and Cloud PBX services over a white-label platform to SME and corporate customers.

The partnership plays to the strengths of both companies. In May 2016 Seacom declared its objective to drive as much as 80% of its revenue through its channel partners and link up customers to its reinforced channel program, characterised by the provisioning of converged solutions on one link and consumed as a service.

Greg de Chasteauneuf, CTO at Saicom Voice Services, said the company's strategy is to build its channel platform to attract the partnership of resellers and enable them to extent their service offering with voice solutions.

Grant Parker, Head of Seacom Business, said the company was looking to complete it data and voice service to customers, and required a voice partner with quality infrastructure. "We were looking for a voice partner that uses reliable and high-quality infrastructure, and Saicom Voice Services' Broadsoft carrier-grade platform gave us the quality assurance that we needed."

Chasteauneuf explains that the platform enables Seacom to offer end-to-end support without having to own the infrastructure.

Cloud PBX

Seacom adds that the Saciom Voice Services' Cloud PBX port for customers also helped "clinch the partnership". "The premise of our offering to our business customers is that they need to have an effortless experience when doing business with us and the Cloud PBX portal is easy to interact with, which was another criteria we had when we evaluated potential voice partners. We want to make sure that we have an outside-in approach, meaning that we look at what customers want, how they want to interact with us, and then we make it easy for them to do business with us," says Parker.

The service provider is looking to expand its fibre to scale bandwidth capability to other markets.

"We own the undersea fibre cable system and supply all Tier 1 internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa as well as all Tier 1 ISPs in countries where our cable system lands, including Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and now also Uganda. We may look at extending these new services into these markets in the near future," adds Parker.