What's Next?
It’s amazing. We are always asked, “What’s next?”, from our customers and our partners in the marketplace. We spend every minute of every day working on building new features and capabilities and trying to make sure they scale and help, and no matter what whiz bang feature we are working on, it’s always…”What’s next”?
We constantly ask ourselves the same question. What’s next? Where are we headed? Where are we taking our interconnect command voice platform? Where is the interconnect voice marketplace going? What are the needs today and in the future? What do we want our platform to be 3, 5, or 10 years from now? We know, we know..these aren’t exactly the profound questions of “to be or not to be?". But, this is what we do. This is the purpose of our company. So, we endeavor to answer them as best we can and, hopefully, discover a pathway that will guide us and allow us to continue to deliver value to our current and future customers.
When we launched our first product back in 2009 (we called it EZ-LCR), we focused pretty narrowly on making a product that would remove the limitations of traditional Least Cost Routing (LCR) and, simultaneously, leverage the benefits of SIP to allow carriers to do something that they previously weren’t able to do, i.e. create unique routing for each and every call on a call-by-call basis. Doesn’t sound so crazy now but, back in 2009, it was pretty revolutionary. We had immediate success and started getting lots of calls from carriers about how we could help them. It was a super exciting time for the company as orders were coming in and we were getting lots of attention in the industry. We responded to the demands and were going along well.
Then, Jay, our CTO & co-founder, wanted to address something that bothered him with our solution. At our core, we are an engineering firm so, like most engineers, we worry about problems we haven’t encountered. In particular, Jay and the team were worried about scalability. He saw early on that the volume of data exchanged and processed in the normal operations of interconnect voice was going to explode by significant orders of magnitude. It was an insight that guided our R&D investments. While many solution providers were in the feature race, we took a different path. We focused on scalability and reliability early on. We were one of the first to implement a Big Data Engine, way back in 2010. Seems logical now, but it wasn’t then. In fact, some of our sales team worried that we would fall too far behind in the feature race. But, Jay and the engineering team were so convinced that this was the right path that it was impossible to resist the passion of their arguments.
Fast forward to 2016 and it was clear that it was the right move for our product and our company. Our product is one of the most reliable and scalable products in the market. We think that it’s without peer in the industry. It’s why we win big carrier customers that need scale and reliability more than anything else. It’s why our platform supports over 8 Billion transactions per month. It’s why carriers such as Vonage, Windstream, iBasis, Comcast, Frontier, Orange, IPBell, Bell Canada, and more than 60 other carriers use our platform.
Simply put, our stuff works, at scale, all the time!
In 2016, with our core scale & reliability solidified, we began to focus on features. And in the past 24 months we have introduced a vast array of features and capabilities including: A# origination routing & rating (we call it i-AZM), CDR reconciliation, SPID based routing, new reporting & analytics, Supplier Assurance Module, …the list goes on and on. Now, as we begin 2018, we look to the future and are determining where we go from here. We recently made a strategic investment in the GCS Cloud infrastructure that will leverage the latest in NFV and VM technology ensuring that our cloud infrastructure provides an infrastructure for our customers for the next 5-7 years.
As we began examining where we are going to go from here, we listened to our customers and tried to dissect their needs and challenges and tried to categorize them into specific areas of functionality.
What we came up with was interesting and pretty indisputable. Carriers are looking to do two things:
Lower the cost of their Opex associated with interconnect voice
Possess the tools to dynamically respond to market conditions
These are now the marching orders of GCS. We are going to pursue lowering the cost of a carriers opex and providing them the tools they need.
To do this means we have to increase automation and intelligence and make the tools simpler to use. That’s what GCS is going to be doing. That’s where we are headed. That’s what is next!
Stay tuned!