Why you should NOT build your own interconnect voice management system

Thinking of building your own interconnect voice management system?  Huh?  Really?  

Is that really what you want to do?  Do you really believe you can deliver something of equal value to what’s commercially available off-the-shelf by 3rd party software vendors?  Remember equal value includes equal investment.

As a math equation it would look like this:

(The total $ invested to build the capabilities available in the market) X
(The time it takes to build the solution) =
The cost $ of a 3rd party off the shelf solution

We state, rather emphatically, that there is simply no way you can build the capabilities available in the market in a reasonable time frame that would be less than the cost of a 3rd party off the shelf solution. You just can’t. I know, I know, there are a lot of software engineers who are very offended right now. To them, we would say, that we aren’t saying you can’t build a tool set equal to the existing solutions, we are saying you can’t do it in a time frame that is reasonable for their carriers.

Take our product, ICP, as an example. We’ve been refining this product ever since we launched it in 2009. That’s 8 years of development, improvement, and feature expansion. 8 years. Even if you had unlimited resources and the best developers in the world it would take you…what…2 years to duplicate the functionality, scale, and performance? 2 years (to be honest, we think we are pretty good at what we do, so our developers would say it would take at least 4 years).

But, more importantly, while you were building to our current functionality, we would be improving it. So, 2 years from now our software will have more features and more capabilities. It will do really cool stuff. Stuff like autonomous driving. Well, not autonomous driving, but maybe autonomous routing and rating, and traffic shaping, and margin management, and on and on and on. There is just no way a carrier can duplicate it and, in reality, they shouldn’t.

The interconnect voice management solution is part of your daily operations, but it’s not part of your competitive differentiation.

So, should you be investing in building solutions to manage common capabilities vs. investing in capabilities that extend your competitive differentiation? Of course not. We’ve covered this extensively in our build vs. buy white paper. You can check that out here if you are interested.

So, there is simply no rational business justification, we have discovered, that would warrant the building of your own interconnect voice management system.

None. Zero. Zilch. Don’t do it. Just don’t do it.

Spend your time building value, not focusing on least cost routing tables, CDR processing & rating, invoicing, supplier management, origination based pricing, rating & routing, carrier offset, credit management, error management, quality, alarming, reporting, etc….Don’t do it!