As Voxbone lays claim to the CaaS category, I caught up with Matt Brown, VP of Product at Voxbone, to get his thoughts on the importance of establishing a new as-a-service industry and to find out where he thinks the biggest challenges will come from.
Our readers are familiar with lots of aaS models but CaaS may be a new one. How do you define it?
“Communications as a Service (CaaS) refers to the communications infrastructure required to power the rest of the as-a-service ecosystem. We deliver it via the cloud as a fully virtualised resource that’s consumable on demand – think AWS (Amazon Web Services) in the application space. That’s what we’re doing for cloud communications, really providing the foundational infrastructure layer. Without CaaS, CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) wouldn’t exist”.
What do you think puts Voxbone at the forefront of CaaS?
“In one word, scale.
In less than 15 minutes, you can go from signing up with Voxbone to running a virtualised local presence across 65 high-value countries and 10,000 municipalities – that’s more than 92% of the total world economy by GDP.
Because we’ve built our solutions for enterprise-scale from day one, we are able to offer platform tools, such as our compliance-as-a-service offering, that significantly reduces setup and operational costs for our users, while also being easy to use. Customers really feel this benefit in the most regulation-heavy markets, such as Western Europe and South-East Asia”.
Who are your natural challengers in this unique space?
“Enterprises investing in digital transformation will invariably hit a point where they are faced with a classic ‘build vs buy’ scenario. Historically, building your own communications platform wasn’t viable. This was the opportunity we saw back when Voxbone was first established in 2005 and a significant part of the CPaaS and UCaaS movement that has grown up since has been built on the back of our CaaS layer.
What this means is that we view ourselves as the AWS of the communications space and we have a significant lead in providing global communications as a service. But just as there are regional data center providers, we find there are regional players in the communications space as well. This includes Bandwidth in North America and Colt in Europe, but Voxbone operates on a completely different scale to these companies”.
Uber, SignalWire, Zoom, Dialpad, NICEInContact and 8×8 are great names to have as customers
How do the end users differ to the platform providers? Or do you provide the same services to Uber as you do to the likes of 8×8?
“At the end of the day, Voxbone is a great fit for anyone who wants to add global voice or messaging at enterprise scale, whatever their use case. For each of our customers, we answer for them the same fundamental question: How do I reliably and easily scale my communications stack to every corner of the globe?”
According to Gartner, Voxbone powers 76% of the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant across UC, UCaaS, both CCaaS quadrants, Meetings and Network Services. If there’s a bigger player in CaaS right now, please put your hand up.
