The Secret to Creating a Flexible ‘aaS’ Business
One of the best things to happen in the past year was the evolution of the modern desktop experience for many users. Collaboration suites have taken prime position in how many people organize, manage and traverse their day. Plus they can easily be extended to take over traditional functions such as making a phone call. This simple feature changes the expectation of the customer and how they expect to consume traditional telco functions in an ‘as a Service’ world.
Traditional telco solutions were priced in a trunking model to enable dial tone for the customer’s phone system. Generally, channels or concurrent models were offered to allow for shared resources. Customers would decide the number of active sessions they thought would cover call volumes for their user community. If a customer exceeded the allocation at any given time, the carrier would simply ‘burst’ or open up another channel. Since these channels weren’t committed or managed in the contract, they carry premium and unpredictable charges.
A frequent industry comment now heard is ‘SIP Trunking is a race to the bottom’ and that’s often true for a simple reason. Dial tone is considered a commodity and most providers haven’t transitioned to an ‘as a service’ model. This model implies there is new, incremental and ongoing value associated with the service beyond the delivery of simple dial tone. Providers need to increase the return on investment the customer receives in exchange for their dollars else they will continue to see declining profits and increased churn in this race.
Leading collaboration platforms including Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and Slack are offered to market in a simple, inclusive, per user per month model. This is because in modern times, customers expect consistency and stability in their monthly recurring expenses. With new players such as Zoom entering the voice space, carriers and service providers sticking to committed contracts, concurrency, channels and bursting models will soon make themselves obsolete.
Dial tone as a stand-alone no longer offers value the way it did in the days of Ma Bell and a pre-mobile, pre-collaboration world. Value has shifted to the services, automation, reporting, enablement, user management and productivity your platform can provide. Tools which instantly activate, allow control of routing, user policies and asset management are important for partners to offer value-added services to their customers as the voice trusted advisor. Tools which enable the partner to manage their business from quote to cash are important for them to be agile, control costs and effectively leverage human assets.
They say it’s about the journey not the destination. SIPPIO continues in our journey to offer a world class platform to voice in Microsoft Teams in a simple, easy to understand and predictable per user per month mode. We deliver a full set of customer automation capabilities directly in Microsoft Teams with Voice Panel.
On June 18th, our second birthday, SIPPIO will introduce the secret to creating a flexible ‘aaS’ business for our partners with the inaugural release of Partner Portal. If you’d like a private invitation to our special, pre-release viewing sessions, simply sign up here.
Partner Portal is designed for partners and carriers to manage a healthy monthly recurring revenue model. Join us to see how we create ease in a ‘Day in the Life’ of a partner with features including:
- Quote to Cash
- Customer Impersonation
- Inventory Management
- Billing Insights
- and more….