Alianza’s landmark deal with Lumen has propelled its cloud communications platform into the mainstream, CEO Brian Beutler has told UC Today.
In April, Lumen and Alianza jointly announced their partnership, which will see Lumen use the latter’s technology to evolve its enterprise voice services through cloud migration.
Alianza has around 200 service provider customers within the US and Canada, but this tie-up marks the first time a huge Tier 1 network provider has adopted its platform.
Beutler said the Alianza cloud platform is the springboard that will help communication service providers (CSPs) become competitive again after years spent falling behind over-the-top (OTT) players.
“If you look at the last decade, service providers have been shackled by softswitches, and it’s not been a friendly time for them,” he explained.
“The battle has been won by OTT providers because they have more innovative products, while service providers have had platforms that just can’t compete. They’ve had their clock cleaned, so they need to become more-agile, cloud operators.
“Alianza is the only antidote for this, and we’re really excited about what feels like the next frontier of cloud communications. The next decade is going to look dramatically different for service providers”
The partnership will allow Lumen to consolidate many networks that it has pieced together over decades of mergers and acquisitions.
The pair will start by innovating in Lumen’s Enterprise division, but Beutler hinted that the partnership would expand over the next 12 months.
Beutler said that Lumen — like most Tier 1 providers — has been left with a “quagmire of complexity” around fragmented infrastructure with switches from just about every hardware vendor.
He explained that Lumen spoke to several providers when hunting for a suitable partner, but said Alianza stood out because they were the only candidate advocating an approach that broke away from adding yet more layers of complexity to dated softswitching and TDM systems.
“Lots of vendors can give providers another version of what they’ve already got, but we can entirely transform their infrastructure and move it to the cloud. It will completely change Lumen”
The Next Frontier
The Lumen deal is Alianza’s biggest yet, and Beutler said it is already having a noticeable effect. Just a few weeks after the deal was announced, he met with a large Tier 2 provider that had seen stories around the Lumen news and wanted to explore how Alianza can help them on the same journey.
The Lumen project is acting as a proof of concept that is piquing interest across the industry, Beutler said.
“In the past, that discussion would have taken six months,” he added. “We would have gone through a whole cycle of evangelising and educating about Alianza and the move to the cloud.
“We came out of that meeting three hours later with the service provider telling us we have exactly what they want.”
Beutler fully expects the CSP industry to have a renaissance over the next decade, having slipped behind OTT providers such as 8×8 and RingCentral. Video-based players like Zoom and Microsoft have also stepped further into voice over recent years.
These vendors have all stormed ahead on the innovation front, while CSPs have valiantly maintained legacy networks in desperate need of modernisation.
But service providers can level the playing field by moving their communication infrastructure to the cloud, meaning they can go head-to-head with OTT players.
“Watch out, because service providers are going to flex their muscles,” Beutler said.
“They’ll have the platform, and they’re going to leverage their local presence, local support, local installation, and broadband to take back market share.
“If that happens, the only way the OTT providers can compete is by lowering their prices and that will make it a really hard market for them to compete in.
“It’s the ultimate comeback story.”
