Virtual PBX, Workstream Collaboration, and UC&C
PBCs and Apps for VPBX, WSC and UC&C for Individualized Business Products
VPBX
Cloud Telephony
Workspace
Workstream Collaboration
Why should a CSP consider offering its own VPBX and UC&C products?
As a CSP, you probably address small, medium and large enterprises in many different verticals as well as public organizations. One-size-fits-all products may not satisfy the varying requirements and budgets of your customers; they also give you little chance to differentiate your product offering from the competition.
Based on our PBCs, ready-to-use apps and low code technology, you can define your own products individualized for your target customers and according to your own market strategy. This is generally much a more lucrative alternative to reselling a third-party product. Moreover, individualized business products allow you to differentiate your offering, acquire new business subscribers and enhance your subscriber retention.
Highlights
Our modular architecture and low code technology allow you to select just the right features for your purpose as well as create and modify the UX of the products’ web and mobile apps.
Low code facilitates the addition of new capabilities and the integration of both third-party services as well as your customer’s own enterprise systems.
We are also migration experts and can move your existing customer base from legacy products, e.g. Broadsoft and ALU.
By putting value into your CSP network, you enhance one of your core assets and further monetize its inherent reliability and data security.
By offering your own business products tailored to fit your market positioning, you at once exploit and further enhance the unique value of your brand
Offer a Perfect Balance of Telephony and Collaboration to Your Business Customers
As the demand for Unified Collaboration and Communications (UC&C) solutions grows, over-the-top (OTT) competitors are relying on economies of scale to expand their business by reselling generic offerings to all markets. CSPs, in contrast, can take a different route. With decades of experience in the market, they can offer far more than one-size-fits-all solutions in the UC&C space. They can build on their deep industry knowledge to deliver simple but focused value-added products, shorter time-to-market, and individualized offerings customized to the specific business needs of their customers. With these branded and unique solutions, they can compete and strengthen the loyalty of their customer base.
Mobility, digital workplace, cloud-based solutions, communication, and connectivity are often key strategic objectives in today’s businesses. Although CSPs can help their customers in all these areas, simply reselling OTT products does not enable them to leverage the unique capabilities of their networks. As a result, they run the risk of weakening their customer relationships, reducing the relevance of their own brand, and limiting their ability to differentiate themselves from competitors.
CSPs should see their UC&C solutions as strategic initiatives that can drive customer retention. These solutions can open the door to providing unique communication capabilities, driving the acquisition of other services in their portfolios, designing solutions that exploit their network assets, and customizing offerings to the specific customer’s business needs. With UC&C solutions, CSPs can enhance their value-added service creation capabilities, become strategic partners for their customers, and strengthen customers’ links with their brand.
These are not just theoretical ideas. Today, three leading CSPs are launching UC&C products based on ECT’s T-LCAP, allowing them to pursue revenue streams from new subscriptions and take advantage of new business opportunities.
CSPs should pivot from their existing network architecture to UC&C, since it can be a competitive advantage and key differentiator against OTT newcomers. However, we recognize the strategic value of purpose-designed integration and the importance of leveraging existing technology investments and assets when introducing new functionalities. From VPBX, IMS, IVR, and legacy systems to new network solutions, ECT’s long experience and sustained success in service migration, consultation, and modernization is a core part of our business.
Implementations of ECT’s unified communications platform can take advantage of API integration capabilities to reduce the impact on existing provisioning flows, operational readiness, and fulfilment needs.
The rapidly evolving needs of today’s business demand new communication services that allow companies to offer a seamless customer experience throughout multichannel environments while facilitating business agility. These demands have driven companies to rethink their investments, switching away from their previous focus on traditional voice services to invest more in collaborative solutions that empower employees’ interactions and support engaging customer communications.
In doing so, companies face several challenges, such as adapting to the loss of previous capabilities with their new solutions, developing the necessary internal competencies, and dealing with complex integration. They may also find themselves considering the use of third-party alternatives, which can threaten the CSP’s strategic relevance inside their customer’s business. On the other hand, being the owner of the network provides a unique competitive advantage, and along with the power of low-code solutions, creates a variety of CSP opportunities. These include the ability to offer individualized services with a short time to market, optimize costs for customers by offering managed and easy-to-operate solutions, facilitating customers’ transition from their previous services, and supporting their migration to the cloud.
For CSPs, regulatory compliance, privacy-policy concerns, storage requirements, and cybersecurity threats are part of doing business. Thus, a deep understanding of their local markets and the digital trust they have acquired for years are key differentiators and competitive advantages that CSPs can exploit.
Offering UC&C solutions tailored to customers’ specific market requirements—hosted and operated within the CSP’s regulated network and subject to routine quality and policy compliance controls—takes advantage of all the regular operational controls that CSPs already have. By owning control of the host environment, the performance inside their network, and data governance, a CSP can leverage its strength as a Trusted Vendor for Business Communication Services and ensure the proper use of customer data within country boundaries, in compliance with industry standards and internal best practices, with minimal additional effort.
In contrast to OTT service providers, CSPs operate in regulated environments, and the scope of the business that they handle with their customers surpasses the limited services that third-party solutions typically offer. Thus, CSP-branded products have the additional challenge of meeting local requirements and extending additional quality metrics, such as accessibility and network reliability, across their service portfolio.
Although this requires higher standards and additional effort for CSPs launching and maintaining products, the ability to comply with requirements such as data sovereignty and data privacy regulations provides a competitive advantage to CSPs that OTTs struggle to match. ECT’solutions have been developed with these constraints in mind, helping CSPs to succeed as trusted partners for local businesses, people, and national interests.
Business needs are different across industries, and OTT’s “one-size-fits-all” approach creates opportunities for CSP innovations that enable product individualization, a closer customer focus, and meaningful solutions to the different sectors and niches they serve, without the operational burden of having to manage each product individually.
Customer acquisition and retention via individualized products has proven to be an effective long-term approach for business success, because it allows customers to see the CSP as a strategic partner for potential future needs, which can range from core telephony services to app development and systems integration for business markets.
UC&C solutions are usually the starting point of day-to-day interactions between companies and users. As businesses continue digitalizing their processes, the need to have information flow between digital assets, employees, and customers can position UC&C as a strategic platform for launching new products. By retaining full control of the platform capabilities and the way the platform is integrated into the CSP’s network, companies can deliver innovations that leverage existing and future technology investments and create unique experiences for their customers.
UC&C solutions are continually evolving to include more capabilities that support new communication patterns and trends. These include messaging, which has become a basic capability for employee collaboration, and voice and video calling and conferencing, which are at the top of the list of end-users’ motivations for new UC&C investments.
Although these features are present in many UC&C solutions, this has often proven to not be enough. Mobility capabilities to support “work from anywhere” trends have become essential for today’s businesses. To address mobility needs, mobile apps and enterprise telephony capabilities can be combined to allow seamless transitions across devices.
On top of those key capabilities, more advanced features can be added to the solution to allow integration into the CSP infrastructure, presence management, incoming and outgoing call routing options, and group communication capabilities. Call queueing, call barring, call monitoring, personalized settings, branding, third-party integrations—the list of possibilities is vast and can continue to be expanded as new needs arise.
CSPs often have customers with special telephony service requirements. These needs can be met by applications that have been developed for years. As companies start looking for UC&C, they often find that they have to work with a UC&C as an independent/parallel solution alongside their current telephony services, engage in complex system integration initiatives, or compromise existing functionalities due to the limited capabilities of the chosen UC&C solution. All of the different choices will limit the value that the UC&C solution can bring, lead to unsatisfied customers and harm current and future CSP business with that customer.
CSPs can avoid these problems by offering their own UC&C services, fully integrated to key telephony functionality. This allows them to provide additional value on top of their current contracts, strengthening their position as a trusted partner to the customer, protecting current review streams, and introducing capabilities that meet new system integration needs. By implementing a Low-code UC&C solution, CSPs can leverage the benefits of low-code development and increase their agility to explore new opportunities and revenue streams among their existing customers, resulting in increased loyalty among those customers.
Companies look for UC&C solutions to enhance their customer experience, improve internal collaboration, enable people to work flexibly from anywhere, and allow information to flow from strategic roles to customer-facing activities to increase productivity.
Companies require functionalities that facilitate employee mobility in a seamless fashion, whether their people are on-premise, working from home, or in the field working closely with customers. The need for employees to access the company’s digital assets and processes, stay connected, and collaborate with peers is the driving force behind ECT’s new initiatives and investments in customer businesses.
By strategically providing UC&C as part of their core enterprise offering, CSPs can modernize and transform their service offerings, enable mobility, and expand their service portfolio to deliver comprehensive solutions. Once designed for on-premise setups, solutions can now support work-from-anywhere environments, without the need for customers to look for alternative solutions beyond the CSP’s offerings.
Home office and digitalization are driving additional system integration requirements that are frequently addressed outside CSP’s core businesses. That is why leading CSPs worldwide see the value of incorporating work-from-home solutions into their portfolios.
Unified Communications and Collaboration
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