The way forward toward success is clear… AUTOMATION!
We’ve written dozens of articles about the evolution of the interconnect voice industry and how it has changed, progressed, regressed, morphed, and evolved. It’s been a crazy ride since the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the explosion of VoIP and Next Gen technologies. Now, in 2019, the way forward for carriers to succeed in their interconnect voice operations is clear. That way is through automation. Simply put, carriers need to reduce the overhead and OpEx associated with running and managing their interconnect voice business. This is particularly true for the pure-play voice wholesalers. The revenue and margin compression continue to be accelerating at a rate that is challenging carriers every day.
While this is imposing a lot of sobering challenges on carriers, it also makes abundantly clear that the way forward is specific and there shouldn’t be a lot of debate about it. It’s automation. The industry can no longer afford to support the large teams of people who used to be dedicated to interconnect voice. Luckily, with today’s tools and technologies carriers don’t need the large staff anymore. The current status of interconnect voice management platforms that manage everything from rating, to routing, to rate decks, to reporting, to alarming, to invoicing, to credit management, to swap deal management, to QoS, to CDR reconciliation, and all the other dozens of functions and features that carriers need as part of interconnect voice is, in a word, excellent.
GCS, as an example, has been at this game for a long time. We launched our first commercial software product (EZ-LCR) back in 2009. Since then we have grown it into a feature rich, scalable, reliable, and high performing platform that has a massive array of features and functions to provide carriers. We do Dynamic LCR, Dynamic QoS, real-time rating, real-time credit management, auto-ingestion of rate decks, precise rating and invoicing, sophisticated reporting and alarming, and on and on and on. This platform enables telecom carriers to manage more traffic with less staff.
We often describe our product in ways that highlight the value to our carrier customers. One area that we haven’t emphasized enough lately is that it is a workforce automation tool. It eliminates the need for human intervention and, therefore, the potential for human error. Not only does it help carriers optimize their revenues and margins and quality for their interconnect voice, it also lowers the operating cost of this portion of a carrier’s business. The destination on the evolutionary map of interconnect voice is clear, it will be an automated, expert system, that requires 10-15% of the people running it then it did just a few years ago. That will translate into huge OpEx reduction for carriers as they will be able to shed staff and reduce errors. It’s an inevitability that carriers should recognize and begin aggressively pursuing. Companies like GCS will be there to help.
