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THE
INCOMPAS SHOW
I
APRIL 3 - 5, 2017
www.bekabusinessmedia.comDAY
2
Thermo Credit Provides $2
Million Loan to Civil Solutions
CSF Focuses on Toll-Free Texting with
Aerialink Acquisition
C
SF (Booth 308), a provider of
toll-free number provisioning
and least-cost routing (LCR),
has more than 100 carrier and
RespOrg customers today. It recently
acquired Aerialink, a provider of
text messaging and other wireless
communications services.
We spoke to Rich Scanlon, presi-
dent and CEO of CSF, and Chris
Currie, president of Aerialink, on
what drove the acquisition and what
to expect next.
Q: What’s the story behind the
acquisition?
Scanlon:
We believe the toll-free
texting market is ripe for some
explosive growth. We also see
continued growth of the toll-free
number market. With the new 833
code release in April of this year,
there will soon be almost 50 million
numbers in circulation. And we see
a consistent uptake in businesses
interacting with customers over text
messaging. So, to take full advantage
of these market trends, we decided
several months ago to look for a
superior text messaging solution and
began to evaluate Aerialink’s compre-
hensive texting solution.
Currie:
Aerialink’s mobile
messaging platform is robust,
flexible, easy-to-use and supports
a range of SMS, MMS and location
services via APIs and applications.
This acquisition provides both our
companies with enhanced capabili-
ties to help our customers succeed
in the growing enterprisewide
communications market.
Q: How different is toll-free texting
from other communications options?
Currie:
From a carrier’s
perspective, there are two types
of traffic in the industry: P2P
(person-to-person) traffic and A2P
(application-to-person) traffic. Toll-
free numbers are currently the only
10-digit numbers that support A2P
T
hermo Credit has provided a $2 million asset-based loan
to Civil Solutions Inc (CSI).
CSI, a San Diego-based company that provides turnkey
cellular, microwave and broadband network solutions, will use the
facility for working capital and to fund corporate growth.
“I was very impressed with Seth and his team at Thermo
Credit,” said Thomas Zorich, CSI CFO. “They quickly grasped
the nuances of our business and took a big-picture view of our
industry and company, and could see the potential in both. We
are very happy to be working with them.”
Seth Block, executive vice president of Thermo Credit, added,
“We are very excited to be working with Duane, Russ, Tom and
the rest of the team at Civil Solutions. This company is poised
to have tremendous growth over the next few years and we are
pleased to be a part of it.”
p
traffic. That’s an advantage we
have right now.
Scanlon:
Toll-free texting
combines the trust consumers
have in toll-free numbers
with the convenience of text
messaging. If you think about
the text-enablement of landline
toll-free numbers, of course, the
industry experts are aware of
this capability, but if you talk to
the everyday small business, it’s
very likely that they don’t know
that this capability exists. So, it’s
important that we, Somos and
CSF, continue to educate our
RespOrg customers and their
end customers.
Q: What value does toll-free
texting offer an enterprise?
Scanlon:
There are so many
benefits, so let me just mention
some of the main ones. It’s a
simple fact today that people
increasingly prefer texting to
any other two-way commu-
nication method. It usually is
less time-consuming to send
a text message compared
to a phone call or email. On
the operational side, toll-free
texting allows businesses to
engage with their customers in
a much more streamlined and
efficient fashion. It also allows
them to conveniently engage in
multiple conversation sessions
at the same time. And, texting
maintains message history and
threaded conversations for later
review and analysis.
Q: How will toll-free texting
benefit RespOrgs?
Scanlon:
RespOrgs are our
primary customer base. They
are the ones that provide toll-
free services to businesses. Our
goal is to help them position
toll-free in a way that will lead
to accelerated market growth.
We’re very excited about the
opportunity of combining our
comprehensive toll-free provi-
sioning capabilities with the text
communications capabilities of
Aerialink, and we’ll explore every
opportunity to enhance and
extend our software-as-a-service
(SaaS) product suite to make
toll-free provisioning, texting and
complex routing more valuable
to our customers.
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