CCA Dives into the Powerful Alianza Bandwidth Partnership

Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA) recently spoke with Alianza CEO Brian Beutler about the Bandwidth partnership and the impact of the announcement on enabling communication service providers (CSP) to stay competitive by transforming their legacy infrastructure and delivering high-growth cloud services.

Before we dive in, could you tell us a bit about Alianza?

Beutler: Alianza is a cloud-native communications platform that is dedicated to servicing the service provider community, such as broadband operators, wireless operators, cable companies, and fiber broadband operators. We arm them with cutting-edge communications applications for their end users.

What are you announcing today?

Beutler: We announced the formal partnership between Alianza and Bandwidth, wherein we are leveraging one another’s technology stacks and solutions. We are combining and integrating them in such as way that provides a cohesive service provider and end-user experience.

If you think about Alianza being the cloud communications software platform, and Bandwidth bringing their cloud enabled communications network/PSTN network, what we’ve done via API integration is created a single unified front door for service providers to do things like provision new customer phone numbers, port telephone numbers, and provision emergency services. Via the integration, they can now do it in one place through Alianza’s cloud communications platform, with what we call flow-through provisioning, back through the Bandwidth network, to drastically simplify so much of the high transaction activity that is needed to support communications experiences for end-users.

What makes this partnership timely?

Beutler: What makes this partnership germane to the current conversation in the market is that the winds have shifted to the service providers over the last six months.

The relationship Alianza has with Bandwidth is longstanding. We’ve been working with them as a close strategic partner for almost four years. But it felt like the right time to take this solution more broadly to market and formally put a partnership around it because the market has moved. Service providers are now realizing in mass that the era of the softswitch is over.

The softswitch was good for VoIP 1.0, but in communications market 2.0, where customers are demanding a much broader suite than just basic voice — such as collaboration, texting, and cloud meetings — and that a much more innovative product set is not very well delivered from a legacy softswitching platform. We just started hearing so much more over the last year that service providers have made the strategic decision to never again install another legacy softswitch in their network.

Our cloud communications platform for service providers is the anecdote to the problems they’ve been facing around needing to innovate and differentiate, which is why we are creating awareness now by taking the partnership to market and announcing it.

What problems are going to be solved by this partnership for communications service providers?

Beutler: The biggest problem we are solving is removing transactional complexity from the service provider’s operation of their communications products. Everything that a service provider must buy, build, integrate, deploy, serve, manage, and scale in a legacy hardware and server environment is daunting. What it has created for service providers is a fragile and difficult to integrate environment that is holding them back relative to their cloud-native competitors that are moving faster than the service provider community has been able to.

The biggest pain point we help service providers address removing operational friction by  upgrading to a true cloud-native, cloud-first communications platform. That is going to create a better, more cohesive customer experience that is going to enable operators to move faster and serve their customers in a more streamlined, frictionless experience.

So, what are the benefits to your customers?

Beutler: What this means for our customers is less manpower, less operational headache, less troubleshooting, and less finger pointing. Basically, it’s time and energy that can be reallocated to service providers’ strategic initiatives around broadband expansion and creating great customer experiences, rather than managing complex networks.

Do you have current customers using this combined solution?

Beutler: Yes, we have more than fifty service providers that are live, in production, in market with the combined solution today. So, it’s a well proven and well established, fully integrated solution that is supporting hundreds of thousands of end user customers.

We have already passed Q1 and Q2. What is the next part of this year for Alianza?

Beutler: It is building on the success we have had so far. We are really excited about the partnership with Bandwidth and the value it brings to our customers. One of the things we are looking forward to is extending the awareness of this joint solution with the Bandwidth team. In the past, we’ve had Bandwidth behind the scenes as a partner, but now we get to be out in front together talking with service providers in a more meaningful way. That’s a very important strategy for the remainder of the year. On the product side, there is a tremendous amount of product innovation taking place, and we recently hired a new Chief Product Officer, Dag Peak.

Stay tuned for more information about our innovation roadmap.