Homegrown System = Limiting Opportunities
So, we have spent many hours both in this forum and with customers and prospects discussing and analyzing the pros and cons of homegrown interconnect voice management systems. Look, we get it. A lot of effort has gone into these systems and they are functioning at what is perceived to be a proficient level. This tends to leave carriers with the perspective that they don’t need to make a change. But what the facts tell us, and what experience with our customers tell us, is that it simply is an incorrect perspective.
Simply put, homegrown interconnect voice management systems are not the right solution and whether it’s today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year, carriers who continue to rely on homegrown systems are making a mistake. And this mistake is costing them real money. Building software is not part of a carrier’s mission. Just because a carrier has software development staff available to them, doesn’t mean they need to use their capabilities to build solutions that are readily available in the marketplace. In the next few weeks we are going to be publishing a reference document that analyzes build vs. buy options. Our research and analysis have led us to one obvious conclusion: There is no reason to justify a carrier building and maintaining their own interconnect voice management platform.
No matter what the reasons were for building these solutions, it just can’t be logically or rationally justified. Further, it is a waste of company resources. GCS, and our peers in the industry, have dedicated tens of thousands of man hours, designing, building, deploying, managing, supporting and refining all aspects of an interconnect voice platform. Think about the breadth of use cases we are exposed to from our diverse customer base. We have to support all these use cases and package them into a product that can be used, reliably with scale, by customers from all over the world engaged in the retail, wholesale, mobile, MVNO aspects of voice services.
A single carrier, no matter what their expertise, simply can’t replicate that. They are hostages of their own experiences and this tends to impede them from looking outside the box, leveraging diverse business cases and user needs. So, homegrown systems, are, by definition, sub-optimal. They may perform the discrete tasks that a carrier believes are required for their interconnect voice management needs, but, they don’t cover the breadth of challenges, needs and future opportunities that an off-the-shelf solution would address. They just can’t.