Service providers have fallen behind the innovation curve and need strategic partners to transform their business and accelerate innovation. In 2023 and beyond, communication service providers (CSPs) need to innovate faster, simplify operations, and decrease costs to deliver the experiences their customers want. For voice and unified communications, they need a cloud communications platform to further enable their telco to techco transformation.
At AWS re:Invent 2022, Adolfo Hernandez, VP of Global Telco Business Unit for AWS shared case studies on reinventing communications and how service providers are accelerating business value through their telco to techco evolution.
Hernandez outlined the progress that AWS, along with its cloud-native partners, have made delivering results on its four strategic pillars and the impact for service providers.
AWS 4 Strategic Pillars: The Telco to Techco Reinvention
The pillars described by Hernandez support one of the key trends in the telecommunications industry: the evolution from telco to techco. The technology is ready and proven, but the telco transition also requires a top-down mandate and clear vision delivered from the C-suite to make it happen.
1. Networks, Cloudified
The importance behind the transformation from a traditional telco to techco is the benefits service providers can apply to their network infrastructure. With a cloud-native platform, voice becomes an application on a broadband network, enabling CSPs to easily transform their network and accelerate growth.
The reality is that hyperscalers can out-innovate what a provider can offer. Now it’s a matter of urgently innovating to provide more and better services and stem the erosion of their subscriber bases, and the quickest way to do that is by embracing the telco to techco trend with network transformation to the cloud.
2. Operations, Simplified
Not all cloud communication services are built alike. Many are built with end users in mind rather than the service providers (and their business goals) that offer them. While many cloud-based benefits like flexibility and scalability are consistent with most available software and applications, the operational simplicity, customization, pricing, support, and many other factors vary wildly.
3. Customer Experience, Reimagined
Customers are looking to their service providers for a range of unified communication solutions, which traditional telcos aren’t offering — despite most of their business coming from enterprises.
The reality is that the OTT UCaaS providers have out-innovated CSP voice platforms and have been taking SMB and enterprise cloud communications market share for the last 10 years.
Yet, survey data shows that SMBs prefer the CSP to be their unified communication solutions provider — but CSPs often lack the right platform to deliver.
4. Growth, Unlocked
CSPs still control the majority share of overall voice because they have so many inherent, defensible, competitive advantages. Since service providers own their network, and because they have local resources in the cities and towns where their customers are located, they can increase monetization of their broadband assets to great success if combined with an agile, cloud-first, extensible product stack.
AWS’s Hernandez, sees this as “an area with tremendous opportunity and a lot of low-hanging fruit for this industry [and] for operators.”
Now it’s a matter of urgently innovating to stem the erosion of their subscribers — and the quickest way to do that is by embracing the telco to techco trend with network transformation to the cloud. With a cloud-native platform, voice becomes an application on a broadband network, enabling CSPs to simplify operations and accelerate growth.
Alianza & AWS are Reinventing Communications Together
AWS’s partner-centric go-to-market motion, and underlying cloud infrastructure combined with Alianza’s turnkey full-stack cloud communications platform solves key business challenges problems for service providers, making it the easy choice for CSP voice transformations.
Together with AWS, Alianza is enabling market-leaders like Lumen to cloudify their entire communications core — both legacy products and the new collaboration, mobile, and anywhere solutions that have exploded over the last few years.
This change is ushering in the most significant transformation to the communications network that we have seen since the rise of VoIP and the softswitch over 20 years ago.
It’s the end of the softswitch era. The cloudification of the communications network is next and AWS and Alianza will take you there.
Begin Your Telco to Techco Transformation with a Strategic Partner, Not Competing Vendor
Increasingly, consumers and businesses prefer buying from companies aligned with their values. Alianza’s CEO Brian Beutler has drawn a firm line in the sand that Alianza will not undermine its service provider customers’ ability to win and grow business customers; we do not directly sell to SMBs and enterprises. Our service providers have the peace of mind that our business decisions are always aligned with their vision and value of success. We win when they win.
And we are doubling down on investment as legacy voice vendors are cutting back. Alianza announced a commitment to $200 million in R&D over the next five years to accelerate cloud communications growth for service providers.
The time is now to begin your telco to techco transformation.
