Getting interconnect voice right.

Okay, okay. You are probably tired of hearing us preach about how important interconnect voice is to a voice service provider. We know, we know. It’s voice. It’s so…yesterday…heck, it’s yester-century. Despite the general view of voice as not a growth engine, it’s still critically important. So, hear us out again. Getting interconnect voice right is not only important, it’s critical. It’s a necessity for carriers. The cost of running a voice business is still relatively high given the thinning margins that have plagued the industry over the last 7-10 years.

So, what do we mean by getting interconnect voice right?

Well, first, and most importantly, we always mean scale, speed, and reliability. As we have discussed ad nauseum, those are the “table stakes” of any solution for interconnect voice. Too often our customers have come to us for our system’s features, but their primary needs were stability, scale, and speed. Features are nice, and important, but the solution has to work. So, the #1 requirement to getting interconnect voice right is to have a solution that is: a stable and scalable process. In short, it has to perform.

Second, critical to getting interconnect voice right is automation. There is just too much data and processes involved in the day-to-day, minute-by-minute, call-by-call operations of a voice provider. Humans aren’t designed to or capable of processing it and, frankly, it costs too much to have humans perform these tasks. What is needed is automation. Eliminate the overhead required and thereby right-size the cost of running interconnect voice. Our own brief history reveals our customers have been able to not only get their costs under control, but also enabled our customers to experience massive growth without commensurate expense increase. Automation is a necessity.

Finally, the last piece to getting interconnect voice right is innovation. As mature as the voice market is, and as much the consolidation continues to happen, there is still a need for innovation. We are constantly bombarded by our customers and partners to deliver new capabilities that will help further drive out unnecessary costs or inefficiencies. The interconnect voice marketplace is a commodity marketplace that operates with a lot of artificial constraints, and solution providers and carriers need to partner together to eliminate and drive out these constraints, so that the marketplace can become more open, more stable, and therefore more predictable. Innovation will keep voice profitable.

That’s how to get interconnect voice right!