Communications providers are turning to the cloud for instant global scale
When it comes to communications providers, one of the most important differentiating factors is the breadth and depth of their ‘reach’, not to mention the quality of your CX. What this essentially boils down to is “how many customers can you allow a business to contact with a stable, reliable connection, and how local can you make them appear?”.
With the cloud promising to take your coverage global in an instant, it’s no wonder more communications providers are turning towards as-a-service models to provision their underlying communications. Let’s take an in-depth look at why communications providers are turning to the cloud.
The ISDN PRI problem
A conventional PRI connection gets you hooked up to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and to phones across the world. The problems with using ISDN are scalability and cost. Businesses don’t just have one phone they have lots, and when it comes to ISDN connections, scale isn’t an easy issue to address.
ISDN PRI lines are very costly to scale and it’s difficult to do so in an agile manner. If your client is a growing business or one that has fluctuating call traffic, this can cause all sorts of problems for their wallet and their watch.
Dealing with ISDN lines also means dealing with legacy carriers, and then you have the issue of replication. You need a carrier in every country, and that comes with an exponential increase in the amount of legal and financial legwork managing all those contracts and invoices. It’s all still very… unwieldy.
Scalability as a necessity
In this day and age, companies can take their operations global in a matter of months. With new digital natives like Monzo, Deliveroo, and Uber springing up each year and blazing a trail for others to follow, it’s no wonder that having a strong basis for scalable comms is becoming an increasing need rather than just an afterthought.
Bearing this in mind, it’s plain to see why communications providers can no longer rely on the old-fashioned ISDN to connect people to a global comms network.
The cloud
The drive among non-digital native firms to the cloud can best be seen in the vast sums of money being spent on digital transformation (DX) initiatives. IDC expects spending on DX to reach nearly $2 trillion globally by 2022. That’s a lot of zeroes!
The reason for this drive is an acknowledgment of the scale, cost, and agility benefits that come from provisioning businesses services from the cloud with a subscription model, rather than relying on costly premise-based hardware or prohibitive, inflexible licenses.
And according to Nemertes Research, the hallmark of successful DX is a switch from legacy to cloud communications, with companies enacting successful strategies 3.7x more likely to use as-a-service communications than those that have not.
Communications providers are shifting their attention to expanding their cloud-based communication capabilities. This transition has created a whole new industry dynamic that caters to businesses that need to scale quickly over wide areas at a lower cost. What they’ve turned to is Cloud Communications.
How does it work?
Where ISDN is characterized by limited bandwidth and flexibility coupled with spiraling costs as you scale, cloud comms, powered by SIP trunks, provide much more agility in the provisioning of communications.
Want to know more about SIP trunks and their benefits? Take a look at our blog.
To give you an idea of how popular this approach has become, more than half of the ~600 companies participating in Nemertes Research’s annual Unified Communications and Collaboration study have already adopted SIP trunking.
And of those adopting, 41% cite cost savings as their primary driver, 39% are primarily deploying SIP trunking to improve PSTN access reliability, and 14% embrace SIP trunking to take advantage of new features like cloud-based call recording or E-911 call routing and location management.
For communications providers, cost savings are a major driving force behind the adoption of cloud communications services and models – enabling you to scale your offering to new markets and customers in a way that doesn’t require huge investments into infrastructure, local counsel, regulatory expertise and carrier relations. With the right provider, these are things you can effectively outsource to the cloud.
