Channel partners and service providers are moving through an era of transformation today, as the way that customers access communication and collaboration technologies begins to evolve. SaaS (Software as a Service) has quickly emerged as the default delivery options for most organisations, whether you're a small business or a growing enterprise. SaaS offers flexibility, scalability, and growth for members of the modern marketplace.
In this cloud-focused arena, it seems that everyone may need to start considering the benefits of open platforms. After all, the traditional telecommunications market that focused on selling on-premises PBX solutions is no longer the most appealing option in the current landscape. The comms channel that we used to know has been disrupted by the rise of new technologies, and even the introduction of adjacent market sellers. from the vendor down, the marketplace is changing, and more competitors are entering the space.
Openness is the key to future market success.
Surviving in the Current Marketplace
For service providers, it's crucial to think carefully about how you can survive in a space where countless new sellers are converging to make the marketplace more cluttered. At the recent cloud comms summit, a lot of people agreed that building a cloud communications platform from scratch might be the ideal solution. The CCA Member Survey conducted by the Cavell Group highlighted building a platform as the preferred choice of service providers. 32% of the providers in the Cavell Group study were using self-built call control platforms to offer their services - a figure that was much higher in Europe than it was in the US.
According to Dom Black, Head of Research for the Cavell Group: "The Cavell Group is tracking over 500 Service Providers across Europe and North America with the majority of them using self-built platforms. There are some obvious larger global providers who would fit into this category like RingCentral, 8x8, and Fuze, but in each country we study, we see a large number of providers who have built their own solution and have successfully taken it to market. There are obvious benefits for running their own platform as it gives them a clear way to build a solution that differentiates from the competition and really addresses their customers' requirements."
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Call Control Platform Choice for CCA Members[/caption]
Dom noted that the fundamental question for today's service providers who decide to build their own platforms is whether it's really possible to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation from platform providers in the future. Cavell is also supporting groups like the Open VoIP alliance to help build a common strategy to reduce the barriers to developing VoIP technology.
The Rise of the Open Landscape and "Choice"
Openness is the future for the service provider landscape. Without open platforms and APIs, the technology and innovations that we have today couldn't exist. Look at BroadSoft for instance. The BroadSoft platform started off very open and interoperable. When BroadSoft was purchased by Cisco, there was some concern that Cisco had never been much of an open business. However, even Cisco has started to focus more on openness, working hand-in-hand with competitors like Microsoft.
