Thing5 is leveraging Verizon Business' industry-leading VoIP and hosting services to offer voice and messaging services for hotel employees and guests. Under an agreement with Verizon Business, Thing5 is providing its hosted platform via a software-as-a-service model to approximately 1,300 hotels, covering more than 275,000 phones. Hospitality chains such as Extended Stay Hotels, La Quinta and the luxury boutique hotel collection LXR Luxury Resorts & Hotels outsource the provisioning, management and maintenance of voice and messaging platforms that serve corporate end-users and guests at each individual property.

With the SaaS model, applications such as voice mail, automatic call distribution, audio conferencing, faxing and instant messaging are hosted by a vendor rather than the customer, and delivered as managed IP services over the Web, helping to control setup and operational costs. Customers pay for the computing resources utilized, making the model highly attractive to the hospitality industry.

Verizon Business provides the IP trunking that connects hotel properties to Thing5 data centers. A newly available Verizon Business service, Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunks, enables on-demand sharing of under-utilized trunk capacity. Verizon Business is the only major North American service provider to offer this VoIP capability to quickly shift bandwidth capacity.

Thing5 also uses Verizon Business hosting to augment its own facilities, thereby enabling load balancing of traffic and providing redundancy to strengthen business continuity.

Verizon VoIP solutions enable high-quality voice communications in a converged network environment, leveraging Verizon Business' vast national and international footprint and a wide range of innovative features. Verizon Business is a leader in developing and delivering IP solutions helping large businesses and government agencies transition to VoIP on their own path and pace. The VoIP services also allow customers to use their existing infrastructure, enabling them to mix and match services, whether network or premises-based.