By Khali Henderson

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SIP trunking provider IntelePeer announced Wednesday that it is expanding its services to include cloud-based unified communications based on the Microsoft Lync platform with its new CoreCloud UC service.

Intelepeer chose Microsoft Lync as its platform to fill a gap in the marketplace, said Charles Studt, Intelepeer’s vice president of product management. On one hand, most carrier-class service providers are using Broadsoft or Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), while on the other hand, those providers using the Lync platform tend to be smaller regional VARs turned UC providers.

In addition, Intelepeer has a long history of supporting premises-based Lync implementations with its SIP trunking product, he said. The IntelePeer SIP platform is qualified and optimized for Microsoft Lync and already supports more than 40,000 Lync users.

The growing popularity of the Microsoft UC solution among users was another reason. “We saw a tremendous opportunity,” he said.

Intelepeer’s new CoreCloud UC bundles Microsoft Lync, SharePoint and Exchange applications with the company’s SIP calling, including local long distance, DID, toll-free and more.

The service comes in a version that is specifically optimized for Microsoft Office 365 users, who do not get the full enterprise voice capability with Microsoft’s Lync Online. By integrating with CoreCloud UC, they have the full Lync functionality.

IntelePeer CoreCloud UC is sold as an all-inclusive monthly subscription that costs approximately $30-$35 per user, per month, depending on the package (Office 365 versions are on the lower end of the scale) and the number of users.

Intelepeer is targeting customers with 200-5,000 users, Studt said.

The initial rollout will be through direct sales as well as some Microsoft VAR partners that already work with Intelepeer to sell SIP trunking in support of Lync systems, Studt said. Intelepeer said it will roll out the service formally to all of its indirect sales agents, e.g. telecom agents, in third quarter after it has developed the proper training programs to get them up to speed on Microsoft Lync.