Updated 09/17/2012 05:32 AM
In-Depth Biz Profile: Allworx
A firm in East Rochester is becoming a leader in telecommunications. YNN's Mike Hedeen takes us to Allworx in this week's in-depth business profile.
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Located in the East Rochester Techniplex, Allworx has been in business since 1998. It's a telecommunications firm that specializes in voice over I-P communications for small and mid-sized businesses.
Chris Hasenauer, Allworx VP and GM says, "what small businesses have struggled with is that technology is usually really expensive and really complex. What we've tried to do is make it inexpensive, high value for small businesses and also make it easier for them to use; easy to install, easy to use. It's completely different model than i think a lot of the big competitors."
The genesis of the company started at Kodak and Xerox. The Allworx founder and many of the engineers it employs came from those companies.
Bill McGuinness, Sr. Software engineer says, "a lot of things that Kodak and Xerox did bringing a product to market, supporting it, doing the software design on it, all of those components are still active here at Allworx. The big difference is, it's much smaller here, we're closer to the customer."
Allworx also had a connection to Paetec and is now a subsidiary of Windstream. That relationship has allowed the company to attract more than 15,000 customers from across the country.
Hasenauer says, "The thing that the folks at Windstream are really excited about is how our phone system can drive network revenue. Now we've got a couple of channels; we sell both through Windstream and then through our own authorized dealer network. We've got about a thousand dealers across the country that sell our phone system. So within Windstream, there's a good alignment with the type of customers they have, they're mostly small business customers, and what we do which is sell phone systems to small business."
Business has tripled over the last two years with more than 300,000 phones in the field. Allworx has signed some big name clients like hard rock cafe. The company continues to expand and is always looking for more engineers to help design its product.
Mike Hedeen, YNN.