Cox Business Rolls Out Essential Cloud Suite of Vertical Market Tailored Business Apps

When it comes to cloud services, vertical industries have very specific needs to meet their business requirements. Cox Business is striving to meet those needs with the national availability of its Essential Cloud suite of cloud-based business applications. The offering is designed to help customers improve their customer relationships as well as increase operational efficiencies.

The offering curates a variety of business solutions and enables them to be purchased and managed through a single portal. It works by recommending three “Basic Essentials” to customers, comprised of solutions pretty much every business needs. Offerings are then tailored to the real estate, restaurant, professional services and personal services verticals.

"Businesses are continuing to embrace the cloud to improve performance, while allowing them to remain customer-focused and revenue driven," said Asheesh Saksena, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Cox Communications. "With this as a backdrop, we developed Essential Cloud to include the very best applications to enable customers to run their small and medium businesses as efficiently as a large enterprise."

The solution works by directing specific industry verticals to a menu of options suited to their business needs. For example, businesses in the professional services industry may choose from a menu that includes email marketing, online appointment booking, proposal creation, and secure file sharing solutions.

It also includes the PayLeap payments/merchants services platform, which was developed by Cox partner Acculynk. The platform gives SMBs the ability to integrate in-store, online and mobile payment processing into one offering. The result is a reduction of time and costs associated with card payment processing.

Addition benefits of the Essential Cloud suite include the ability to access apps from anywhere and at anytime. It also provides continual backup along with personalized service and live consultation through a concierge team that can guide users to select the best apps to suit their businesses requirements.

"Essential Cloud is another example of our commitment to provide technology solutions that small business need to grow," added Steve Rowley, senior vice president of Cox Business.