6 July 2009

Automatic income and “cash generating machines” have been around for nearly a decade, and we all know where such messages belong: spam folder. However, certain aspects of ISTP business closely resemble “automatic income earner” – at least if implemented correctly.

The late 2000s brought about heavy focus on outsourcing, subcontracting and aggregation: starting with the RSS technology to the vast explosion of affiliate business. At the same time, VoIP saw one very specific service crystallize: DID numbers. These two important developments existed in more or less parallel worlds until DIDX.net was launched.

DIDX, which stands for “DID Exchange”, is an online trading floor for ISTPs to sell and buy their DID numbers. It enables a carrier to sell DIDs through an automated process, and in case of DIDX, subcontracting a process is more than just outsourcing. Just like news and products aggregation sites, DIDX gathers the sellers (and buyers) of international DID numbers in one place and puts you, the user, in the driver’s seat. If you already have some SIP or IAX infrastructure in your organization, it’s quite easy to add foreign DIDs to it: log in to your DIDX account at http://didx.net and click “Buy DIDs”:

The country list continues and, along with more mainstream locations like Canada or France, you may even instantly setup SIP gateway presence in more remote places like Jamaica or Russia. By the way, considering the current global economic trends, outsourcing and telecommuting tools are once again a very hot commodity – considering the huge savings. For the business buyer, DIDX therefore a great money saving instrument. Your corporate clients no longer wish to invest into infrastructure and offices; $20/month multi-channel DID number in Moscow, Russia suddenly becomes a much brighter idea than $20,000/month representative office in Russia’s capital. This same scenario can be applied to many other BRIC and non-BRIC developing areas in the world suffering from flight of capital.

And if you are the seller on the DID Exchange, you can get your share of the income streams being redirected from traditional business to VoIP services. In the near-saturated VoIP industry, selling DID numbers is a great value-added service to offer for some ISTPs. The DIDX service platform is quite unique in this sense, because it is probably the only service around enabling you to automate your DID sales and conduct wholesale operations rather than tedious, time-consuming customer support and billing.

This is how it works. If you are a VoIP provider, you are already offering termination products in some form. You may or may not want to have individual customers: in the first case, you would be more like Skype or Gizmo, and in the second, you would be more like Siptraffic or VoipJet. There are also a number of hosted softswitch solutions on the market where you can sell your termination on the aggregation platform or exchange. To date, nobody has offered a similar product for DID management. If you want to generate business from DID sales, you previously had to produce individual or corporate agreements with your users and do your own billing to collect the fees. Of course all this implied support and customer service.

DIDX allows you to avoid all the billing and support headaches by simply routing your DID stock to their IPs (in the simple URI format, like SIP/111111111@sip.didx.net) and let the platform do everything else. As long as your DIDs arrive to the Exchange, you do not have to worry about anything. The platform will take payments from buyers and will issue you Paypal payments or ACH bank transfers with your profits. In theory, you never hear from any of your customers (unless there’s a problem with your numbers of course in which case DIDX staff will work with you to correct .) You are providing the origination capacity and nothing else – no man-hours, none of your valuable time, just the IP connectivity to the DIDX platform. If you sell a lot of numbers, it becomes quite similar to controlling an oilfield. Charge the buyers for pumping the resource; provide no further assistance.

There’s also another aspect of doing business that DIDX takes care of for you: marketing. You no longer need to seek out individual or corporate buyers, spend money on pay-per-click; you may still advertise if you choose to, but merely being listed on DIDX is your best exposure. Your buyers will likely go to DIDX first to get origination in your country. There may be more sellers in your city or countries, and this is where the stock market principles come in. You can compete against other sellers by offering a lower price on your products. There is also a vendor rating system that assigns “scores” to the sellers based on their uptime history, lack of complaints and mass quantities being available.

It does make sense to offer large amounts of DIDs at wholesale prices, since the buyer on the other end (remember you can sell and buy completely anonymously) is likely to be another carrier looking to purchase blocks of DID numbers in your city or country for their wholesale operations. You get access to a potential qualified market of 12,000+ service providers who want to buy DID for their millions of customers. For example, you are a CLEC in Dublin, Ireland and a Houston, TX based oil and gas trading company is looking to establish an Irish division. Their integrator will likely go to DIDX.net, select “Ireland” from the dropdown list and purchase your 100 DID numbers. Do you have to do customer service and support your American end-user? NO! You won’t even know this entity exists; your numbers will be sold and you will get sale notification by email. You just get paid for the capacity. I

In addition to wholesale, your numbers will also be regularly purchased via APIs on various websites offering “follow-me” services. The DIDX API allows any website to sell their stock and take payments; this means, your stock is also being sold on every website the API is installed.

Becoming a DIDX member is easy. There’s excellent support should you have any questions; and it’s your choice of IM to use: Google (News - Alert) Talk, MSN, etc. Although problems are extremely rare, you can always chat to someone to get help.

DIDX also regularly invites members to various events around the world because they are a media partner. See the list at http://www.didx.net/events. You get discounted passes for exhibitions like Cluecon, ITEXPO, CommunicAsia, SUPERCOMM, ITU World, and many more. Their team often uses its media tools like video and podcast channels to showcase your services.

Super Technologies Inc.

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