If you are a cloud communications platform provider – whether it’s UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, or any cloud-based application that requires telephony integration – Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) is critical to scaling your business.
BYOC offers your enterprise customers the flexibility to maintain existing carrier relationships and take advantage of competitive rates and features in local markets where they have a presence. For multi-national companies, BYOC is often a critical path requirement.
But how easy is it to offer BYOC to your customers? The more flexibility you provide, the more markets you serve, and the more challenging BYOC becomes.
In terms of flexibility, leading cloud platform providers typically offer multiple options:
- Premise-based peering: This is the most common method and involves connecting to the local carrier through an enterprise SBC, which requires ensuring interworking and interoperability from the equipment to the providers’ SIP trunk for calls to the PSTN. Examples include Microsoft’s Direct Routing for Teams Calling, Cisco’s Local Gateway for Webex Calling, and Google’s SIP Link for Google Voice.
- Cloud-based peering: This option promises to simplify BYOC for enterprise customers by eliminating on-premise equipment configuration and establishing cloud-to-cloud connectivity between the platform provider and PSTN platform provider. Examples of this option include Cisco’s Cloud Connect for Webex Calling and Microsoft’s Operator Connect for Teams Calling. Some platform providers also use cloud-based peering to offer bundled services through carrier partners (similar to Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral).
BYOC is not limited to UCaaS. Leading global CCaaS and CPaaS providers including Avaya, Genesys, Five9, and Twilio all offer BYOC. Innovative PSTN platform providers are developing programs enabling customers to choose their preferred cloud platform while establishing themselves as the PSTN platform of choice in the process. Examples include Bandwidth Maestro™, IntelePeer BYOC, and BICS in Europe.
Regardless of the model, supporting BYOC requires significant investment in time and expertise with dozens of SBC platforms and hundreds of carriers around the globe. If you have to integrate with legacy premise-based PBX and contact center systems, it only adds to the complexity.
Limiting customer options will cost you deals; a poorly designed approach will cost you long, drawn-out deployments, unhappy customers, and overwhelmed support teams. Getting it right requires expertise, experience, infrastructure, and the flexibility to rapidly scale up during peak demand.
A well-thought-out BYOC strategy is crucial and why top global brands rely on TekVizion to support their BYOC strategies. TekVizion is Microsoft’s authorized testing partner for Operator Connect and Direct Routing. We are also Google’s test partner for their SIP Link program, and our experts support Cisco in onboarding new carriers to their Cloud Connect for Webex Calling program.
In supporting these programs, we work closely with every major SBC vendor – we have at least 40 different SBC platforms in our lab – and we have onboarded hundreds of carriers around the globe to these programs, providing our customers with a reliable, consistent model and with the ability to scale up and down based on demand.
How well is your current approach to BYOC working for you and your customers? Are you juggling priorities, struggling with resource bandwidth, or lacking the right expertise to support your customers demanding more BYOC flexibility?
TekVizion’s comprehensive telephony integration services encompass program design and development, testing execution with SBC and PSTN providers, and the creation of detailed user-friendly configuration guides for fast, hassle-free customer deployments worldwide. Whether you want to launch a full-scale BYOC program, or if you just want to start by optimizing your telephony integration testing and documentation process, TekVizion can help!
