*editor’s note: blog updated following June 3 news announcing layoffs at Microsoft Cloud Azure for Operators
In my last blog post, “Beware of Your OTT Frenemies,” I wrote about how OTT UCaaS providers like Ring Central and Ooma are dangerous frenemies that telcos should be wary of. In a moment of critical need for many early in the pandemic, these OTT vendors provided a lifeline by offering plug-and-play solutions that enabled telcos to quickly provide UC and videoconferencing tools to their end-user customers. But it is just a matter of time before the consequences of these decisions begin to show their true colors.
The longer that telcos rely on frenemies to deliver cloud-based services to their customers, the more vulnerable they are to losing brand equity and direct customer relationships to vendors who view telcos simply as a route to market. To neutralize this threat, telcos need an effective strategy for delivering modern UC solutions (voice, video and chat) from the cloud – a step that would mitigate the encroachment of OTT providers.
But that isn’t the only rising threat for telcos to be wary of. The other is coming from “inside the house,” to borrow a phrase from the horror movies. Their own legacy voice infrastructure is holding the axe looming ominously above them.
As an industry, telcos have often opted for the status quo to safeguard service reliability and protect revenue. Ongoing doubts about new technology and business models have fostered a certain inertia, leading service providers to rely on existing infrastructure or gradually implement bolt-on features. As a result, the voice and UC infrastructure of today is complex and difficult to scale. The lack of investment and modernization has led the safest bet to become the riskiest where telcos are beginning to cede market share to the same vendors that are also vital partners.
This is no longer a “distant” threat; telcos must act now. Microsoft just announced its plans to let go employees in its Azure for Operators businesses directly impacting Metaswitch staff, and this happened just a month after they sent out end-of-life notice for their MaX UC App. To make Microsoft’s intentions even clearer, they recommend moving customers to Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone as the alternative – a move that threatens to fully remove or disintermediate telcos from their direct relationships with customers.
That should send shivers down the spine of any service provider still trying to maintain competitiveness by using their legacy infrastructure. And, now that Microsoft is clearly signaling its plans to retire Metaswitch altogether, service providers must move to an alternative platform, or else; they will be left scrambling with a network that is not future ready.
In the face of sunsetting technologies and OTTs that are plotting to poach customers in droves, moving to the cloud gets more urgent every day. Alianza provides a simple way for telcos to successfully move away from their increasingly risky legacy technology to a modern cloud-based platform. And by accelerating this cloud transformation, we enable telcos to provide cloud-native applications that meet the needs of commercial and residential customers on a dramatically streamlined platform without the reliance on third-party OTTs.
These rising threats have completely changed the math for how to minimize risk in the telecom world: Now, the riskiest thing for telcos is to keep leaning on their legacy systems and continue with the status quo. It’s more urgent than ever to get to the cloud, and Alianza is the partner that makes it a reality.
