The importance of expertise in your interconnect voice platform vendor
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So, you have finally made the decision that you need to replace your interconnect voice management platform. Congratulations! That’s a big realization that you have come to, and once you have selected and implemented the right solution you are going to reap all the benefits: lower costs, increased revenues, more interconnections, more prestige, better meals, etc.
But, now the real work comes. How do you know what the right solution is?
Where does price fit into your criteria? If price is most important, that most definitely means you are sacrificing quality. We all know that price= value + quality, which means a lower price either has to have lower value or lower quality. Value is a little bit subjective. Is it feature breadth, community of customers using the platform, or user experience?
Quality isn’t as subjective. Quality is measurable. It’s definable. It’s speed, scale, reliability. It’s error rate. It’s availability/uptime. But where does quality in a software platform come from? Well, it’s the software development process used (Agile, Object Oriented, WaterFall, etc.) combined with the software engineering expertise and capabilities and, most importantly, the domain expertise that those designing the software solution possess.
Take for example our company, GCS. We are domain experts in interconnect voice. We’ve been involved in the marketplace since the Telecom Act of 1996. Interconnect voice is not only what we do, interconnect voice experts are who we are and that is our competitive advantage. Our marketing folks, our support engineering team, our founder, and even our software architects all have been at the interconnect voice game for a long time. In some instances, over 20 years! And this expertise was on the carrier side. Jay Meranchik, our founder and CEO, built, managed, and optimized one of the world’s largest VoIP wholesale networks. And by built, we mean he actually installed servers, designed software, and led the operations team, the NOC team, and the Support Engineering team. Our Marketing guy, Mark Delaney, was responsible for an interconnect voice biz that generated over $180M in annual revenues. Brian Kirby, Carl Schmidt, and Christian Rehman worked in the NOC and on the Tier II & Tier III engineering teams. This experience is imprinted on our DNA.
Even today, we don’t think ourselves as a software company serving the carrier marketplace, we think of ourselves as a carrier services company that provides software to help our carrier colleagues. It might seem like wordsmithing, but to us it means something. Our expertise is in voice interconnect operations, sales, finance, engineering, NOC, network, etc. We’ve seen it, and done it, so many times. Now that we have been a carrier services company for over a decade, we’ve seen how over 100 carriers around the world run their interconnect voice businesses. Sure, the industry has changed dramatically. Sure, it’s a lot harder to make a profit now than it was. But that’s why now, more than ever, our expertise is so important. We can help any carrier in the world improve their interconnect voice operations.
We have tried to distill all of the knowledge we have and continue to gain in our software. Our software is different than our competitors. Not just because the user interface is different or because we have certain features and don’t have others. No, our software is different because it was designed by carrier people. Everything from how our software manages quality, to how we manage business (the metrics we track, what we show on our dashboards), are all built from a group of seasoned professionals with decades of experience running a carrier’s voice interconnect business. That’s why it’s different. That’s why we think we offer the best solution in the marketplace. That’s why expertise is so important and so valuable.
So, if you are at the point where you have decided it’s time to upgrade, make sure somewhere in your evaluation criteria you include domain expertise and give it fair consideration. Also, check us out. We are not only experts in the domain, we also deliver pretty good interconnect voice software solutions. Just ask iBasis, Vonage, Mediacom, PTGi , and the list goes on…
