Demand for UC has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Zoom now counts 300 million users and Microsoft Teams added 12 million users in a single week, demonstrating how users have embraced UC to keep operations going during lockdowns. However, these are knee-jerk reactions to an emergency situation; what’s really interesting is what happens next.
The pandemic may turn out to have radically accelerated acceptance of cloud-based communications and home working. “The developments we’ll see in the next six to 12 months are what I would have expected to see over the next three to five years,” confirmed Mehmet Hussein, the technical design authority at Voxbone.
“People have been forced to take the first step, which is the hardest”
“They’ve avoided the tidal wave of non-productivity, and will probably look at whoever provided their free trial UC solution first, as they move from managing the crisis to making home working a more permanent option,” he added. “I suspect people that hadn’t used cloud-based services before because they couldn’t see the value, now realise their workforce is remote and they need to find solutions to ensure their workers can talk and collaborate seamlessly.”
However, while organisations have been able to maintain productivity thanks to standard UC apps, they have not been able to access their usual enterprise communications applications and have been working on a best effort basis. This is particularly important for contact centre apps and businesses that require compliance to regulations, especially those that operate internationally.
While connectivity appears to have risen to the challenge of home working, the services supporting global communications have struggled. Many countries don’t have flexibility in their TDM infrastructure to scale with such an immediate demand, including the ability to ‘turn it down’ if or when the peak passes, thus not being able to support the way enterprise communications is dealing with this climate. In the past this would have meant organisations needed to form relationships with incumbent carriers in each country, necessitating multiple contracts and complex management burdens.
For UC service providers this has meant they can’t offer their entire bundle of services in every market their customers operate in because of regulatory differences and local network capabilities, not to mention the amount of work required to launch new coverage when dealing with legacy providers in different languages to their own. For enterprises, there’s no guarantee that the multi-national carrier they select will be able to support all the products they want to use, specifically in terms of the ability to make local calls with all the same features that you get from working with a in-country operator.
Private SIP-based network
Voxbone provides a way to address these issues by enabling channel providers and enterprises to scale communications just like any cloud-based service in their portfolio. Its private SIP-based voice network spans the world and is interconnected with the national telephony infrastructure in 65+ countries.
In essence, it provides a full PSTN replacement solution across the world’s highest-value markets that delivers full feature parity with legacy solutions for the first time from the cloud, plus all the benefits of working with a cloud-native provider including OpEx subscription models, real-time provisioning for rapid deployment, elastic scalability, centralised portal management and API support. Explained Hussein:
“We enable the provider to build integrations into Voxbone with the enterprise holding a contractual relationship with us to ensure they get the regulatory compliant services they need”
“We’re in a unique position because we talk directly with regulators and interface into incumbent networks. This means enterprises get immediate, direct local access into all the markets Voxbone currently serves and their communications applications, whoever they are buying them from, can be supported by our global platform. It makes more sense to offload the communications and compliance headaches to a specialist like us, much like companies offload security, for example.”
Find out more about integrating your platform with Voxbone.
