Bandwidth provides traditional carrier services as well as a portfolio of APIs for voice, messaging and 9-1-1 access to service providers throughout the United States like Microsoft, Google, RingCentral, Zoom, and more. Having cracked the communications provider market with their CPaaS style offering, Bandwidth is officially going direct to the enterprise.
I spoke to Caitlin Long, Product Marketing Manager at Bandwidth, to get the lowdown on their direct offering for enterprises.
Differences between direct and wholesale models
One major difference between the wholesale and direct packages is around 9-1-1 calling. With the enterprise direct offering, 9-1-1 is a major piece of the solution with regulatory and legal implications. Caitlin said “it’s no longer a pieces and parts solution where communications providers can choose to remove the 9-1-1 from our solution. It’s more holistic because we’re serving enterprises directly who have legal obligations to keep their employees safe and connected.”
When Caitlin spoke about an enterprise's legal implications around 9-1-1 access, I asked whether direct customers saw this as a lesser known item for telephony.
“It depends on the customer and who you talk to. Most corporations are now aware of the need for compliance, but aren’t quite sure how to get there”
Caitlin said the 9-1-1 compliance conversation is lengthy but highlighted Kari’s Law specifically. Kari’s Law states that organisations with multi-line telephone systems must have a configuration that permits users to directly initiate a call to 9-1-1 without dialling any additional digit, code, prefix, or suffix. There are also associated legal implications regarding the obligation for an organisation to be able to provide accurate location information at time of call, which, as Caitlin noted, is becoming a bigger issue for organisations they continue to migrate their communications and telephony into the cloud and expand their distributed workforce.
Support
Moving from a wholesale to an enterprise model typically requires a big change in the level of support offered. However, Caitlin told me that Bandwidth’s target market, like those in the Fortune 1000, know what they are doing, as sophisticated IT departments are part and parcel of larger enterprise’s infrastructure.
Transition from wholesale to enterprise
When I asked Caitlin what the biggest hurdles in developing an enterprise model were, she listed the usual suspects like internal enablement and product activation; however, with the entry into a net-new market, building brand awareness and has been the biggest focus. One of the ways Bandwidth is looking to do that is leveraging their existing presence as the cloud-native carrier powering a large majority of market leading UCaaS, CCaaS, and Conferencing platforms.
“We made a huge splash this year at Enterprise Connect, and almost every time I talked to a large enterprise prospects I found they were using our network without even knowing it”
This may be because Bandwidth powers Microsoft Calling plans embedded within both Teams and Skype for Business as well Google Voice, G Suite, Cisco BroadSoft, Genesys PureCloud, RingCentral, 8x8, Mitel, BlueJeans, Zoom, and Cisco Webex.
Bring your own carrier
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Caitlin Long[/caption]
Part of Bandwidth go-to market strategy for their direct to enterprise offering, is positioning themselves as the natural selection when customers, particularly ones of the aforementioned vendors, choose to participate in a BYOC or “Bring Your Own Carrier” program. BYOC, or Direct Routing in the Microsoft world, enables you to choose the best carrier for your business to plug into your respective contact centre or unified communication platforms. Today you can choose Bandwidth as your carrier of choice for platforms like Microsoft Skype for Business, BroadSoft, Genesys, and more.
Understanding user requirements in the enterprise world is one of the principles behind Bandwidth’s “Bring Your Own Carrier” campaign. Caitlin explained that the decoupling of carrier services and telephony platform enables several benefits. These include:
