Making Everything Easy
In today’s world of technology, everything seems easy. We have a world of information at our fingertips. We can buy anything online and receive it the next day (in some instances the same day). With a few presses of a keyboard or a few touches of our smart phones or tablets, we can access and use information. This has made everything seem easier, right? Want to buy a car for a fair price?... done. Want to plan a trip?... done. Want to get a ride home?...done. Want to get a mortgage? Buy an airplane ticket? Buy a computer?...done, done, done. Everything just seems easier now. That is the advantage of technology, it obscures complexity. It makes the seeming complex, seem simple or trivial. But, the reality is that simple or easy usually belies complexity and sophistication. For example, the engineering that goes into touch screen is amazing (if you are interested, you can read about it here). The technology that is enabling self driving cars is also amazing because the complexities that surround self driving cars are too numerable to comprehend. And yet, there it is. We’ll have self driving cars commonplace within the next decade.
What does any of this have to do with interconnect voice? The reason we bring this up is that our experience with these revolutionary technologies has both increased our expectations of solutions and at the same time, obscured the complexity surrounding the problems these solutions address. It’s almost as if we are now experiencing this duality of wanting it to work but not wanting to understand how or why it works. We have spoken with several large Tier 1 global carriers who have often complimented us on our platforms capabilities, but then turned around and said it needed to be simpler. Interconnect voice is a complex, dynamic, rapidly evolving industry and the winners in the marketplace will be comprised primarily of carriers who have been able to reduce their operating cost effectively while maintaining their business operations performance at a high level. We are talking about automation. Automation of all the processes, tasks and utilization of resources available to the company. The scope of this automation is wide (very wide) and very deep. And it’s challenging solution providers like GCS to solve problems beyond scale and reliability. We are now being asked to make it “easy”, and that is exactly what we are going to do. We’ve spent the last few years focusing on scalability and reliability. Now we are focusing on usability and automation. Today, we believe our solution can offer carriers a 5-7 fold improvement over their existing interconnect voice operations costs. From termination costs, to head count, to inefficiencies, we believe that number can double or even triple!
The next wave of innovation in the interconnect voice OSS & BSS industry is going to be focused on this notion of “making it easy”. Over the next 3-5 years, carriers will need to improve the automation that governs all of their back-office processes and systems. This is the only way an industry that operates on a near zero revenue basis for voice calls can successfully operate and survive.