XCast Labs— providing versatile and proprietary VoIP technology to meet your 21st-century communications needs.

For the first time in over 100 years, VoIP provides an opportunity to bring about significant change in the way people communicate: the ability to use a single high-speed Internet connection for all voice, video, and data communications.

Over the last few years, VoIP has proven to be a real game changer in the realm of telephony. As VoIP has become increasingly popular among companies and individuals, it has also taken over a substantial portion of the telephony market.

However, because of the immense competition of VoIP providers in the market, the quality of services provided is often the deciding factor for consumers.

XCast Labs are one of the most influential companies in the VoIP communications sector worldwide. They were the first and still the best. For nearly three decades, XCast’s engineers have been blazing trails in unified communications. Their founding team first demonstrated the power of speech recognition technology in the mid-1990s and introduced the world’s first digital Personal Assistant.

The following excerpts were taken from a conversation with Patricia Mathis, Co-Founder, and Executive Chair, and Vladimir Smelyansky, Co-Founder, and Chief Technical Officer, at XCast Labs

Q. What prompted you to start XCast Labs? Can you tell us about the journey so far?

After the mid-1980s Bell break-up, I created a Washington-based consulting group focused on telecommunications. This experience provided an early insight into the trajectory of what we now call unified communications. Although voice and data still relied on separate networks, more creative product development teams were anticipating a post-analog world. By the end of the 80s, Sprint had launched an all-fiber network and MCI had integrated voice and data on a single platform.

In the mid-1990s, I recruited a team of engineers in Chicago to develop the first voice-recognition-based Personal Assistant. As part of that project, we began exploring broader applications of internet-based systems and SIP-based platforms. XCastLabs’ CTO, Vladimir Smelyansky, was a key architect of those platforms and guided the introduction of the first soft switch into a major carrier network. Vlad re-assembled the most talented members of his team to form XCastLabs in the spring of 2002 and introduced what is now called “SIPTalk IP-PBX.” The first commercial installation occurred in July 2003. By early 2005, hundreds of companies were using XCastLabs’ hosted solutions.

Q. What market gap does XCast Labs fill? How is the company making a difference for its customers?

Our goal has always been to deliver the best-in-class communication services to small and mid-size businesses at an affordable price. XCastLabs serves multiple markets for our “all in one” voice communication needs and has a nationwide and global footprint. Our engineering team built our proprietary network from the ground up based on three basic principles: reliability, flexibility, and scalability. 

From the outset, our goal was to provide products that perform at the same—or better—level as the most reliable landline provider. But we also wanted to offer much greater flexibility to this market by allowing our 125 Resellers to white-label our services as their own and build their brand and customer loyalty. This flexibility allows business customers to address a wide range of vertical markets—including markets so diverse as retail chains, restaurants, schools, hospitals, hotels, banks, cable providers, and call centers.

Q. How has XCast Labs been able to influence VoIP communications over its lifespan?

Because we entered the market before most others, we frequently provided both the know-how and the technology to promote overall growth in the internet infrastructure. Some of the largest brands known today adopted XCastLab’s Session Border Controller while they developed their platform.

Q. What is the XCast Advantage? How does it help differentiate your products from your competitors?

We have a product we call “XCast Advantage” which is part of our termination suite. We empower ITSPs to run a range of telecom services within a single, cloud-based pipeline. XCast enables 1,000s of calls per second and processing of prepaid and postpaid charges for voice or video calls anywhere on earth. Our high-volume switching capability integrates voicemail, videomail, faxes delivered via email, and voicemail alerts via SMS in a single web application into a single, web application. Our highly intelligent STIR/SHAKEN compliant network enables advantageous NPA-NXX, flat-rate pricing, and high-grade carrier and call center features. Our partners get revenue from traffic exchange and wholesale trunking. Our carrier services deliver exceptional quality from the VoIP industry leader since its inception.

Because we built our own proprietary network, we don’t have to pay others high licensing fees, and this means we can pass along these savings to customers. Our greatest advantage is probably our reputation. We place a lot of emphasis on service. This means every customer gets a white glove experience and no one has to sit at the back of the phone. Our 24x7 customer service center is staffed by people who know the customer and care about solving their problems. So, our Resellers and others don’t think of us as just a vendor; they see us as a partner.

Q. How has moving your XCL platform to the cloud helped the company?

Although XCast has lived in the cloud for two decades, we introduced more cloud real estate as part of our next-generation network design during the 2019-2020 period. The new architecture was framed around our private cloud and expanded our network flexibility. This innovation allowed us to accommodate the requirements of both legacy customers who only wanted basic features and those customers who require emerging technology and features. Our new architecture provides better utilization of our surviving hardware and enhanced our scalability while allowing our Reseller customer base more freedom to tailor services for their customer base.

Q. Would you like us to highlight something important happening in your company that we may have missed asking?

We’ve added several new call handling and security features to our platform. Customers have more options to block spam and robocalls, so only receive the calls they want. Additionally, we have a Customer Callback Option. This service will wait on hold for you while keeping your place in a queue. When your call moves to the front of the queue, you will be called back and connected to the first available agent.

XCast will shortly release a new product available through the Google Play Store that allows customers to make and receive calls from other devices using their PBX account. This product has many of the functions of a typical VoIP hardware phone. No setup is required. Customers can just download the app and log in.

Providing the best VoIP communication services in the marketplace

Patricia Mathis is the Co-Founder and Executive Chair at XCast Labs. Pat has been a board member or CEO of several prominent communications companies and a Board member of some major American universities for the last forty years.   

Vladimir Smelyansky is the Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer at XCast Labs. Vlad has over 35 years of leadership in the development and deployment of cutting-edge technologies spanning image and voice recognition, real-time networking, telephony, and VoIP.