DecisionOne, a support services firm for IT, announced this week at the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., agreements with Pandora Networks and FacetCorp to use DecisionOne’s Desktop to DialTone service to install and support VoIP deployments, particularly those for customers with multiple locations.

DecisionOne will support deployments of Pandora Networks’ WorkSmart service, a combination of hosted VoIP and Web collaboration features that the company sells on both a retail and wholesale basis.

“Many of our customers are buying hosted services because they have offices in different parts of the country,” said Jon Beck, COO of Pandora Networks.

“We are a 40-year-old IT service company,” said Geoff Drayton, vice president of business development of DecisionOne. “We have 4,000 technicians, a nationwide presence and expertise in IP, and are able to provide overnight a national footprint for companies like Pandora. We do not sell VoIP, but if you have nine offices around the country, we will install it. So Pandora can chase large national customers and assure them that they have a national infrastructure to do that.”

DecisionOne will perform assessments of the site where the service is to be deployed. The services include the bandwidth currently available to the facility, and assessing the premises equipment, such as gateways, router configuration and other aspects of the LAN to ensure top performance for voice over that infrastructure.

“We can provision service, and it works on fly, but, for any deployment above three to four users, the responsible thing to do is network assessment,” said Beck. “If it’s a lifeline connection, we want to take the time to make sure that it works properly. But we are not interested in building out our own team to do that.”

He emphasized that DecisionOne “will not compete with resellers but can offer services to them, particularly if they sign up a customer with a multioffice environment.”

FacetCorp., a vendor of IP PBXs for SMBs, will use DecisionOne to provide not only infrastructure assessments and installation, but also some first-level technical support.

DecisionOne   www.decisionone.com
FacetCorp. www.facetcorp.com
Pandora Networks   www.pandoranetworks.com