Bring Your Own Carrier Solves Cloud Contact Center Migration Pain

welcome to z cast everybody i'm zeus caraval from zk research and i'm your host for these uh i'm here for another one of my thought leadership series uh before we get going on that though i just want to give a quick shout out to e-week my media partner all z casts are done in conjunction with the ewe key speaks program today i'm joined by paul dryden who's the vp of business development at a company called bandwidth.com who's very well known in the communication space um although maybe not quite as well known to buyers so why don't you uh you know give us a bit of an idea who bandwidth is who you sell to what you do and what your role is yeah i'm happy to do that um let me start with my role really quickly i've been with bandwidth for a little over five years uh primarily i focus on our um our good going into new market strategies so identifying new opportunities for the business places where we should make investments for growth opportunities in terms of bandwidth itself there are two major components of what we do like the first is that we are a telecom carrier right everything that you would expect to get from a telecom carrier in terms of voice capability toll-free network messaging 9-1-1 all things that we do own and operate a network so that's pretty straightforward the second piece of our business is that we're also a cpas provider so every component of our telecom network we wrap up the software and we provide api access so if you have uh an application and you don't want to hire a team of telecom engineers and you don't want to maintain a sip stack you have the ability to access all those discrete telecom features through api calls so bandwidth is doing this we're global we're doing this in 65 countries we're probably best known for being the telecom uh behind the scenes for the largest cloud communication platforms out there so if you're using one of the major c cast vendors one of the major ucas vendors or conferencing providers chances are we're the telecom that's underneath the covers that you're using from them and most recently and i think what we'll touch on a little bit here zeus is that um we're using those cloud platform relationships as a springboard um it really have been for the past couple years into providing those same set of services over directly to the enterprises right and and we can talk a little bit in a moment about how enterprises are uh looking for a different type of relationship with their carriers these days yeah i was looking at your list of customers and on the wholesale side every big major cloud communication provider whether it's on the ccas side of the ucas side is a uses bandwidth and so it's likely that everybody watching this is probably running over the network somewhere they're just not really that aware of it so uh and i think as far as the 911 type of services and things that you know those types of things i know you've been on the leading edge in a lot of cases with kerry's law and um you know things like that right so i think you've done a nice job putting that together now we are here to talk about uh recent contacts in our partnership before we get into that though uh let's just talk about what's going on in the contact center world and with the move to cloud what do you guys see in there well so um all right so the contact center has been relatively static uh for nearly a generation now right you had a wave of investments where contact centers were bringing in new equipment new technology to drive drive their growth and this really didn't change a whole lot they had on-prem equipment they had they managed most of their technology stack on prem and they were pretty comfortable using the three primary carriers that were available to them out there right verizon att and lumen at this point and i actually made early in my bandwidth career i made some probes into seeing how open the enterprise contact center market was to bandwidth coming in and replacing their existing carrier relationships and just a few years ago there really wasn't much interest right there really wasn't much interest in in rocking the boat changing anything they had in their stable environment but then that started changing don't fix it right that was if it ain't broke don't fix it right and and probably even more importantly if we don't want to introduce a new name into our technology stack that our executive team for example may not be familiar with the bandwidth at that point really not nearly as well known as the other major carriers but the the powers at play have begun to change and i think most fundamentally uh behind the scenes has been the change to to sea gas right this desire for enterprise contact centers to move from this on-prem environment and to go into the cloud so just i don't know two and a half three years ago i think anybody who's paying attention to the industry would say that the vast majority of enterprises that were adopting ccas that they were small medium-sized businesses if they're getting into the larger contact centers then they were probably the less sophisticated ones but these were the enterprises that were really attracted to that offering of going and bundling everything and having one vendor one throat to choke that's going to be all your infrastructure all your software and your telecom bundled into it so that was kind of like wave one of the ccas world um all the big names just rocketed to their growth doing that very very successfully and then covet hit right and as kovid hit all these plans all these larger enterprises that had been dabbling in the idea of making the move to the cloud had that catalyst that made them accelerate those plans and they moved extraordinarily quickly right they started to adopt ccas at rates i think even the ccas platforms would admit themselves they weren't expecting to move so quickly so now you have this environment where instead of just the small medium-sized businesses or the unsophisticated larger enterprise contact centers using ccas it's now the biggest players out there right to a point where what we say internally is that ccas has eaten the world every enterprise you talk to at this point either has made the move to a ccas platform they're in the process of doing it or they're talking about when they're going to do it and so with that change has come a whole different set of expectations by the enterprise and new risks right so you know if you when you when those larger enterprises deploy seek has they're a lot more complicated right there's geographic issues and why don't you talk about some of the risks that come along with that and some of the things that companies have to think about mitigating against yeah i think the first thing that comes to mind is just the the complexity right so if you look at an architectural diagram of a large complex contact center and how their on-prem environment has been built over the years you're going to see dozens and dozens of different vendors that they have in there and you're going to see a lot of spaghetti junction lines that are combining the different tools right those points of integrations that they've built and so when the enterprise thinks about forklifting its capabilities what they've spent the better part of a generation building on prem and bring it to the cloud it frightens them right they recognize that they're there's a lot of places where things can go wrong and so even though they're getting the mandate which is often coming from the c-suite these largest enterprises to make that move to the cloud right the enterprise has bought into that vision of the cloud being a better model move them from capital expense to opex move them from maintaining these massive teams to take care of their equipment and their software to really being able to repurpose a lot of those people so the c-suite says let's move on they issue the edict that says go and then you know you have the contact center owners that are left holding the bag having to make sure that they make that move and that it's seamless right so if you're a contact center in a regulated environment you don't get a pass from your regulators when you're making the move from on-prem to the cloud things still have to work you're not allowed to have downtime you have to be able to provide the service to your customers uh pretty much without any breaks there and then that's the business expectation and you can't pass the buck to the cloud provider either right it's still on you so it is on you so there's that contact center owner holding the bag saying move to the cloud but you cannot mess up you have to do this perfectly and that's uh that's it's a big bold requirement for them yeah so you recently announced a partnership with one of the leading contacts under vendors genesis your duet product now works with jettison before we get into the partnership for those not familiar with duet give us an idea what is duet ball well so there's been a trend in the market um as c-cass has eaten the world and ucas did it before c-cass even where originally the the early adopters of these platforms they wanted the whole bundle right they wanted to buy everything from microsoft teams or from ring central or in the contact center from genesis cloud as the bigger ones came in with those more complex environment uh and and frankly with buying power they said there's some pieces that of that bundle that don't necessarily make sense for us to buy from the cloud platform provider and one of those pieces is is the telecom part of it right so rather than buying bundled telecom from the cloud provider they're saying we want to bring our own carrier into the mix and and that's been a really important dynamic here these large contact centers are saying yep we'll go with genesis cloud but genesis we recognize that it doesn't make sense to buy the telecom from you we have the expertise to to buy and manage that ourselves and they recognize really two things one buying it directly from the carrier that's really where the best economics kick in right there's nobody that has a markup requirement that's in the mix there and secondly when it comes to troubleshooting and support they want direct access to to the carrier to be able to do that and so byoc has become an important part of what all the cloud platforms need to be able to offer to get access to win the deals of these these large enterprises and so what bandwidth has done with duet is that we have uh picked and partnered with a select group of these cloud platforms the ones that tend to be the most open the ones that tend to be most progressive in terms of what they're trying to do for their customers and we say how can we provide a byo service and bring your own carrier service with you that's really going to delight our joint customers and that's the basic premise we did it last year with microsoft teams and with ringcentral and we're super excited to to launch the same capability with uh duet for genesis cloud cx the genesis customers uh what do they get from this what they maybe double click a little bit on the partnership itself yeah they get all the benefits of of what we bring with with our network um but the two things that i would probably highlight the most is um well maybe three things one it's all predicated on the relationship between us and genesis so this is not a new thing we've been working with the genesis team for over seven years we are a significant part of what they offer in the background for their own telecom offering if you were to to buy genesis cloud voice through them right their bundled telecom offering and so we've been meeting with them and working with them on a product level and on an operational level for a really long time that's meant that that we have these what i might call cross-matrix relationships right on the product side on the executive side on the operational side we look at their roadmap they share it with us we share our roadmap with them and we actively try to identify those places where we can do things that are going to benefit the customer right so uh one place that that jumps out immediately to me on the product side is that we have customers that are coming to us and they're saying this move to the cloud from on-prem has left them in a bit of a lurch in terms of some of the integrations they have to some best-of-breed tools right that don't have built-in ready-made integrations through genesis in part because they require like access to stuff that the carrier is in charge of right call media call control sip signaling all those sort of things and so our joint customers who are asking for this bandwidth and genesis we put our engineers together and we create capabilities uh in this case uh media forking capabilities to make sure that we can pass the call information onto third-party systems that then become integrated to genesis cloud so there's a level of just cooperation and relationship between our companies that comes comes out and really benefits our joint customers through this program good now um in the preview you actually highlighted a couple of customers and i think those are probably worth going through here so can you give me a couple of examples of customers that are using the relationship and the benefits they've seen yeah so um bandwidth acquired an international carrier about a year a year and a half ago right company called voxbone that moved us from being really a north american carrier to now having coverage in over 65 countries representing 93 percent of the the world's gdp and is made as an automatic player when it comes to enterprises that have multinational presence right and with that multinational presence comes really a desire as they're moving to the cloud as well to simplify so one one customer that we highlight is a a global document company and they are in 15 different countries they decided to make the move to genesis cloud and at the same time they wanted to use that opportunity to consolidate i believe there's nine different carriers down to one right and that became a place where bandwidth could immediately with our international presence come in and and offer these capabilities so instead of working with nine carriers it's now just bandwidth providing all the services to them that um that's a recurring theme right a lot of global companies are looking to simplify that piece of their operations and bandwidth is able to step into the breach and and help them with something so they don't have to negotiate with tons of different carriers out there so that's one another is um i like to highlight the case of a a really large and sophisticated enterprise that's us-based and primarily operating in the us and they chose to get a genesis cloud but they had a bunch of these third-party systems that they needed to integrate with they were with one of the traditional legacy carriers that legacy carrier uh was not able did not have the capability of helping them with the integrations of these third-party systems so bandwidth and genesis that was the case i was referring to earlier we stepped in and we helped create this media forking capability that now allows them to seamlessly integrate their their call flows with best-in-class best-of-breed voice bio-authentication services ultimately that's going to be extended to contact center ai for things like real-time agent coaching that requires sentiment analysis it also needs to be constantly listening into what's going on with the phone call and we have several other categories that we're looking to invest in jointly to bring that to customers there's probably one more piece i'd highlight there that i think it goes on the softer side but the softer side matters when it comes to how your carrier and how your your contact center platform vendor interact with each other so i mentioned this long-standing relationship between bandwidth and genesis uh this operational relationship one of the ways that it manifests to the benefit of our joint customers is that and it sounds simple to say we each maintain lab environments of each other so bandwidth has a genesis cloud lab environment in which we not only plug our own trunks to be able to match that bring your own carrier capability but also we do integrations with these third parties that we know customers want to integrate with genesis is doing the same thing on their side so where that becomes beneficial is when a customer wants to come live when they want to turn on bandwidth trunks right that telecom capability inside of genesis cloud we come together all three of us the customer the bandwidth genesis we jump on a call and we work through the configuration process and we get them live so talk to enterprises that have gone through this cloud migration anytime recently and the process of turning up telecom can take days if not weeks right because the communication oftentimes is kind of poor from among the vendors we were able to do this in the one client i'm referencing here in 90 minutes we went from a standing start all the way to sending production traffic through their genesis cloud environment because of how we work together and good you know and it's a good lesson for buyers too i know it's always easy to choose your incumbent provider but i've always said during times of market transition you need to reevaluate the vendors you're working with and the shift of communications the cloud is the perfect time to look at your telecom uh provider because you cannot run a next generation contact center on a legacy network it just leaves too many holes there so yeah is that that's the dynamic that's the exact dynamic that we're seeing out there right now is that and it's funny sometimes the contact center owners that are talking to us they can't really identify even why they feel so compelled to leave their legacy carriers oftentimes it's based on this instinct that says the same thing that they've been depending on for so long is not what's going to take them into the future and so they come to bandwidth and they say as we move to say genesis cloud as we move all of our operations into the cloud we're looking for a cloud-first carrier and that's really how bandwidth is able to position what we offer there well we're almost uh at the end here i but you are vp of business development so you're always kind of looking at what's next um before you go i just want to know what's next for for bandwidth here so this is the place where bandwidth is committed to making lots of investments so the enterprise not only have we grown there significantly over the past two years since we started dipping our toe in the in the water so to speak but it's really it's accelerating and we see this opportunity to bring byoc to the enterprises who are moving to the cloud as kind of that very traditional blue ocean opportunity the other carriers are not investing behind what they're doing and we're willing to jump in and say bandwidth sees not only the opportunity to invest here but we we think it should be a requirement so as we're looking to what's next a lot of that investment is going behind enabling all these third-party tools that these big sophisticated enterprises have had running on prem with all these integrations in place we can become the glue that brings that together as they move into the cloud right so we're doing this very much on a as requested basis by our customers that's where they're asking for voice bio authentication integration that's where they're asking for help with the ai with pci compliant tools etc now what we see the great opportunity being here is that not only can we offer those integrations and sort of that one-off sense but there's an opportunity to offer something that we would call a universal telecom platform here to really lean into our cpas chops and and use the apis that we've created to help with all these connection points in the long run what we hope to provide enterprises is the ability to use our capabilities as an orchestration layer if you will to help all the components in the contact center that they previously fed through the sbc when they're on prem we can we can play that role for them as they move into the cloud all right paul dryden from uh bandwidth you've got duet now for microsoft teams bring central and now genesis congratulations i'm sure that won't be the last one though so um so thanks for joining me today and if you're watching please don't forget to click to subscribe and i'll see you next week on zcast you

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