To innovate is to do things differently.
It is to resist the status quo in favour of stepping bravely out of a comfort zone.
In Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Centers (CC), innovation to date has enabled providers to offer the real-time alarm, voice and video applications upon which the world now depends.
However, they have either been developed in-house at significant cost or purchased from global vendors as giant monoliths that are often over-engineered and lack the ability to respond in an agile, cost-effective way to users’ specific needs.
Dare to Outsource Telecom “Plumbing”
Today’s new generation of truly innovative providers can be even braver. They can dare to leverage the power of the cloud; they can dare to outsource technological expertise; and they can dare to use third-party building blocks as the foundations of a new, disruptive way-of-building model.
The potential prizes? Faster product development, improved customer experience, quicker problem resolution, reduced costs, increased profitability.
All those providers need is the support of an expert delivery partner that provides the backend – or telecom “plumbing” – that UC/CC providers need for functionalities such as routing, switching and media server capabilities, and the cutting-edge expertise to make it happen.
It’s Time to Disrupt How UC/CC Solutions are Built
“Typically, providers sell a solution with many times more features than their customers need, that is kept in their data centre, and for which they have full responsibility,” says Gunnar Reinholdsen, Founder at leading real-time communications platform provider iotcomms.io.
“The UC/CC solution is either built in-house as a monolith or purchased as a monolith from a vendor. The monolithic-built solution provides everything from the customer facing application to the backend functionality in one single codebase.
We believe there is an altogether different way in which they should be building their solutions, a more modern way. Frontend applications and backend functionalities are different things, require different competencies, and decoupling the two has numerous benefits. For UC and CC solutions providers we can provide the backend functionalities they need to be modern and successful.”
‘Lego brick’ Flexibility for All
iotcomms.io provides cloud-based, loosely-coupled services that bring the telecom ‘plumbing’ needed in all kinds of real-time alarm, voice or video applications, all delivered as pay-as-you-use managed services. It enables its customers to put more focus on their applications, and frontend innovation and enhancement.
“Some of our customers started to build on their own but quickly realised that they not only need more people, they also need more expertise; all of which is extremely expensive and difficult to source,” says Reinholdsen.
“We already have some of the best engineers in the world, so our customers benefit from that. Also, everything we have on our platform is available to everyone. So, if somebody wants to tackle a problem in a certain way, we build it in and then make it available to all.
We are not building custom services, we are building a platform on Lego bricks that can be used in different ways by different customers. They all have the same level of security and resilience, use the same sip server or network address translation (NAT) functionalities, call recording or handle specific protocols, just to mention a few.
“Dare to be Different” Gives an Edge
“With the monolithic approach, customers have to buy everything and, regardless of whether they are using one or 500 functions, they have to pay for everything. However, the limitations with many of the monolithic solutions mean customers are unable to build exactly the applications that will enhance the services they provide.
“CTOs will not get fired for choosing their old proven monolith providers but being brave and opting for an alternative, disruptive model empowers a more modern and flexible way of building solutions – breaking things up in ways which enable the provision of more agile functionality that can make a big difference when it comes to the end customer experience.”
It seems that providers brave enough to step out of their comfort zone can equip themselves with the modern tools and building blocks that will help shape the future of enterprise grade communication.
To learn more about how iotcomms.io can help your and your customers’ businesses benefit from a new way of building UC and CC solutions, visit the website.
