On the eve of a potentially historic $55 billion merger with Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) announced that its Business Class Phone (BCP) service can now be offered by its reseller channel.
As a complement to its direct sales effort, Ira Morris, senior director for the reseller program at TWCBC, said the company envisions resellers expanding the reach of TWCBC into geographies where its direct sales force doesn’t reach and embedding its network services within more complex IT solutions.
“For the first time, we’re enabling our partners to sell dial tone,” Morris said. “That will give our partners access to recurring streams of revenue.”
In addition, Morris said that TWCBC is in the process of rolling out application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to make it easier for partners to programmatically embed network and cloud services inside larger solutions.
The Business Class Phone is the latest addition to the Internet, Ethernet and cloud services that TWCBC already offers via channel partners. Now available as a wholesale service, TWCBC provides services over a fiber-optic network spanning 41 states.
The services include a flat-rate calling plan that offers features such as call forward and transfer, three-way calling, speed dial, caller ID, directory listing, sequential hunting and circular hunting at no additional cost. Options such as voicemail and remote call forward are also available for a monthly rate.
As a division of Time Warner, TWCBC provides Internet, voice, television and network services, as well as cloud services, through its NaviSite subsidiary to more than 675,000 business customers. In terms of competing with other carriers, Morris noted that as multimedia traffic continues to grow, TWCBC and its partners are finding it easier to replace DSL lines that were never designed to handle large file uploads and downloads.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.