By Khali Henderson

CHANNEL PARTNERS  ANPI (Booth 2010), a longtime wholesale carrier, made its enterprise indirect channel debut with its updated ANPI VIP hosted unified communications solution at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo Wednesday.

ANPI announced its VIP service in August 2013 through direct and wholesale channels. The services went through alpha and beta testing over the last few months before it was released to the enterprise indirect channel in January.

The Channel Partners event was the program’s “coming out party,” said Mike Cromwell, ANPI’s new chief sales officer, in an interview with Channel Partners. 

The VIP service, which is based on Broadworks, also was upgraded since its launch to include BroadCloud features such as a mobile client and collaboration tools, making it one of the few fully Broadsoft implementations. “Fewer than five companies have done the full-blown implementation globally,” said David Byrd, chief marketing officer for ANPI.

ANPI VIP also includes third-party apps, such as call recording and storage, Byrd said.

Cromwell estimated that 50 customers would be on the platform by the end of February.

While ANPI offers agents a traditional agreement to agents to sell the ANPI branded services for a monthly recurring commission, it also has a private-label option for larger agencies as well as IT VARs and MSPs. Branding is available on the ecommerce engine and the customer care portal. ANPI also provides resellers with billing outsourcing if desired.

ANPI had started offering SIP trunking services to the channel in 2013, but pulled back on that with the hiring of a new CTO, who decided to redesign the carrier’s backend systems for automated ordering and provisioning as well as hardware (phones/routers) delivery.

Byrd said the backend includes an ecommerce element for online ordering for end users as well as sales agents. “The billing, account and customer admin portal is initiated automatically. Within 15 minutes, the account is active,” Byrd said.

In addition, ANPI announced at Channel Partners that agents can earn double SPIFFs (200 percent of the MRC) on top of monthly recurring commissions for three-year contracts for ANPI VIP. For two-year contracts the SPIFF is 100 percent of the MRC.

ANPI also announced a new VIP Club. Top performers in various sales categories through May 31, 2014,  will earn membership in the club and a chance to earn a free trip to Lake Tahoe, Nevada in August 2014.