Viewpoint
Ahead of Carriers World 2019, Total Telecom caught up with Matt Brown, VP of Product at Voxbone for a quick chat.
Tell us a bit about Voxbone, your history, and offering
We were founded in 2005, and are now one of the largest enterprise cloud communications providers in the world, delivering voice and messaging services in 65 countries, covering over 93% of global GDP. We have customers from other communications platforms, and direct enterprise clients including Zoom, Uber, Aircall, Orange Business Services, and NICEInContact.
We’re a national operator in the vast majority of the countries where it operates, meaning we can provide the same service as BT, AT&T or Orange, but in a cloud-native way. As the AWS of the communications space, we power 100% of Leaders in the 2018 Gartner MQs for CCaaS and Unified Communications. We believe in easy scaling. In less than 15 minutes, our clients can go from signing upwith Voxbone to running a virtualized local presence across 65 high-value countries and 10,000 municipalities.
What are the biggest risks for enterprise comms in the cloud age?
In a word, compliance. Regulators around the world are cracking down on voice fraud, meaning it’s more important than ever to ensure you own your numbers and partner with a national operator. This is an industry gold standard as it guarantees the provider is licensed and adheres to all local regulations.
Partnering with the wrong provider could leave you without service, as a best-case scenario, and will leave your business vulnerable to local regulatory scrutiny. It’s not all bad news though, the ISDN turn off is a good example of regulatory changes becoming a positive. Many companies are using it as an opportunity to consolidate their comms infrastructure and move it to the cloud.
For UK businesses looking to expand abroad, what are the biggest challenges? How is Voxbone tackling this?
At a time like this, when Brexit brings with it all kinds of challenges businesses may be looking to expand across the channel. One often-overlooked challenge is around maintaining basic business communications. Without a suitable communications plan in place for a post-Brexit transition, businesses may find it increasingly difficult to communicate with overseas offices, colleagues, and contacts due to complex and varied regulatory requirements.
Our ability to standardize and simplify telecoms across 65+ countries is why some of the biggest brands in the world have chosen to rely on us for their core communications needs. One of our latest solutions being the ability to bring your own carrier, the ability to integrate our network into any SIP-enabled platform or service.
What are the benefits of a Bring Your Own Carrier approach?
First and foremost, you own your own numbers – they become a safeguarded asset for your business and they can never be taken away from you. Until now, when adopting a bundled voice solution there’s been a tradeoff between choosing the best software features or functionality; or choosing the best network for your needs. By separating platforms and the underlying telephony, businesses get the best of both worlds. A BYOC approach enables companies to bring their telephony to the cloud and plug into their preferred communications platform.
They get all the features and benefits of the platform they know and love, but can use a trusted provider at the telephony layer too. By partnering with Voxbone for your BYOC strategy, you no longer have to choose between a best of breed application or voice network – you can have the best of both worlds.
What do you think are the most exciting emerging trends in cloud comms?
BYOC: UCaaS and CPaaS players are waking up to the fact that it’s really hard to operate a global telecom network. This is why we’re seeing some of the biggest platforms in the space adopting BYOC as a core part of their product strategy. It opens up an entirely new set of options for enterprise customers
to partner with service providers that can really meet their needs. Future-fit Regulation: As a business, we’ve spent the last decade working together with regulators in over 65 countries to define how telecoms should work in a cloud-based world. Programmable compliance was one of the themes that emerged out of these discussions. It’s exciting to see the industry start to take regulations seriously and it’s been fascinating to help play a role in shaping the industry’s future standards.
ABOUT VOXBONE
Increase the efficiency of your comms with agile, reliable and global cloud voice and messaging that let you reach customers wherever they are. By consolidating in the cloud with a single SIP connection from Voxbone, you can halve the cost of your comms. Our elastic services are fully compliant in every market and give you enterprise-grade local presence on demand across 92% of the global economy. It’s why we power the majority of Leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for UC, UCaaS, CCaaS and Meetings. Our happy customers include Uber, Skype, Zoom, 8×8, Dialpad, NICE inContact, Orange Business Services, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Serenova. Build your best business communications with Voxbone. For more information, please click here.
