What’s the value of expertise in interconnect voice?
Software solution providers are a weird breed. We have to be really good at building, maintaining, deploying, and supporting the software we provide. That’s a skill in and of itself, and it’s part of why we, in the age old debate of “build vs. buy”, side with “buy” 99.9999% of the time.
But what about industry expertise? Where does that come in to play? How important is industry expertise to the software solution? It’s an interesting question that we think depends on the application. In the interconnect voice market, we believe industry expertise is incredibly important. In fact, we think it’s one of our differentiating attributes because, here at GCS, our founding employees were at the beginning of the VoIP revolution that started in the late 90’s and has accelerated in through the first 10 years of this century. Jay Meranchik, our CTO/President & Co-Founder, built one of the world’s largest global VoiP networks. Back then, some of our senior support engineers were supporting interconnect carriers, managing quality, LCR tables, NOC, etc. Our Marketing Dude was the product manager for the global wholesale voice product. Our lead software architect led the development of the CRM and workflow tools for interconnect voice solutions. All of this was done at ITXC, a company whose name is starting to fade, but who at the time was considered number one or two in the global wholesale voip market.
What is that expertise worth? How does that influence our software? How does that differentiate us from our competitors? And most importantly, how does our expertise increase the value we provide our customers?
With all other things being equal, would you rather buy an interconnect voice solution from a vendor who had carrier experience in their dna or the other guy? It should be fairly evident that assuming all other things are equal, the one with the carrier experience should provide greater value.
Well, guess what, all other thing aren’t equal. In fact, in the interconnect voice OSS platform, no two software vendors are alike.
Sure we all claim the same things:
Great software, tons of features, excellent speed, scalability & reliability right up there with NASA and software excellence on par with Apple. Easy to claim, hard to disprove. So, what’s a carrier to do? How can they pick?
Well, our suggestion is this:
Look at the company they keep (who are their customers and partners?)
How long have they been in business?
What is their experience?
At GCS, we have great customers. Some of the largest carriers in the world have selected GCS: Frontier, Windstream, IBasis, Earthlink, Vonage, Comcast, Sify, Orange, and PTGi.
Our partners include: DELL, Cisco, Equinix, Metaswitch, Ribbon, and Internap. Great companies, with great products.
Our experience: we are experts at interconnect voice and have lived it from the carrier and vendor side since the late 1990s.
We think the combination of these things makes our company and our product a compelling choice.
What do you think?
