Why You Should Buy Voice & Video Communication-as-a-Service

There are many benefits for solution providers choosing to disrupt the do-it-all-yourself model and move into a cloud-based model, buying parts of your solution as a service. But the service you buy must be flexible enough to integrate with your existing solution.

This blog looks at the benefits of moving from a do-it-all-yourself model to buying voice and video communication-as- a-service and explains why a flexible communications platform with domain fit is key in this move.

Coming from a monolithic structure

Traditionally, product development and operations have been centered around solutions built in a monolithic structure where the solution providers develop and run all parts of the solution themselves. This do-it-all-yourself concept has typically created a belief that only by running the full end-to-end solution themselves, customer experience is secured.

For providers of mission and business critical solutions, real-time voice or video communications have been part of this monolithic structure and as such developed and run by the solution providers.

Disrupting the traditional model

The introduction of modern cloud deployments and as-a-Service delivery models open up for reevaluating and disrupting the monolithic building practices and do-it-all-yourself model. By buying voice and video communications as a service instead of developing and operating it yourself, several benefits can be gained.

Free up time to focus on your core business and improve customer experience, reduce the need for specialist competence and speed up time to market (TTM) are just some of the benefits you get. But you need to ensure that the communications platform on which the voice and video services are based, has the flexibility needed to fit with the processes, workflows, and specific needs of your domain.

Increase focus on your customers’ experience

When disrupting the do-it-yourself model, a possibility to engage with external parties is introduced. Resources in your own organization can be freed up and put in areas where they are needed the most in order to improve your customers’ total experience. Focus can be concentrated on your core business and core competency instead of being spread across all parts of the offering.

The engagement with external parties such as a voice and video communication specialist is a way to both capture cutting edge telecom expertise, but also to reduce the operations burden. By integrating with a communications platform provided in an as-a-Service model all the required signaling and media flow are handled by the provider of the communications platform, and not by your own personnel. More about this in the two following chapters.

Ease the need for telecom competence

Building real-time voice and/or video communications for mission or business critical applications can get complex. Protocol fragmentation, different codecs, call flows with many call legs between different participants, network address translations (NAT), etc. are examples of challenges that can arise. Consequently, deep telecom competence is required, which might not be part of your business’ core competency. When buying voice or video communication as a Service from experts in telecom technology, your need for such competence in-house is significantly reduced.

Another competence-related issue is associated to an increasing difficulty in finding the right competence for older, perhaps proprietary, technologies. It might be problematic to find personnel with the right skills to maintain, upgrade and operate legacy technologies and solutions. When moving to modern technologies such as cloud and API-based, access to competence is less of an issue.

Reduce cost for development and operations

The cost of in-house developer resources for voice and video communications is significantly reduced – or even totally removed – when buying it as a service. These resources can instead be used in areas enriching your customers’ experience.

As mentioned earlier, the need for maintenance and operations personnel is significantly reduced in an as-a-Service model. In addition to the difficulty in finding the right competence at all, the cost for these personnel in an as-a-Service delivery model is saved since operations is part of the service you buy.

Speed up Time To Market (TTM)

In a cloud-based – preferable cloud-native – communications platform the time to introduce new or enhanced functionality can be shortened significantly. Testing and verification can be performed more efficient and in less time with a cloud-native and microservice-based communications platform.

The complexity of a monolithic structure, which typically involves both technical and organizational aspects, makes the introduction of service enhancements or new services more time consuming and exhaustive.

Scale to new markets in an effortless manner

More devices, more calls, introduction of new services or expansion into new geographic regions, all are reasons to scale your solution. A cloud-native communications platform built with a serverless backend, will automatically and instantaneously scale as need arise. Anytime and anywhere, following the global availability of a public cloud infrastructure.

The scalability is elastic in both directions, up and down, and you will only pay for the service volume used at any given time. Such quick responses to elasticity fluctuations are difficult – if not impossible – with a monolithic building practice.

The ability to scale in a uniform manner, replicating a deployment from one site to another, is an essential advantage with a serverless cloud-native communications platform. Significant time savings can be made. Time for installing, deploying, and configuring resources at every new site to expand to is thus avoided.

Flexibility is key

When moving away from the monolithic structure into a cloud and service-based model flexibility becomes a key factor for a successful integration. In order to integrate the voice and/or video communication with your existing processes and workflows, great attention must be given to the flexibility of the communications platform. It is essential that its APIs provide a deep level of granularity and a possibility to pick and choose exactly the functionalities you need for your specific solution.

iotcomms.io brings unique flexibility for ultimate domain fit

The flexible APIs of iotcomms.io’s communications platform allow you to tailor the voice and video communication for a unique fit into your specific solution and your customers’ use cases.

The APIs provide highly granular functions that can easily be mixed and matched allowing you to build exactly what you want. This flexibility coupled with the platform’s unique domain capabilities such as support for a wide range of domain specific protocols and features, make it an ideal fit for integrating into your existing solution.

Some of the functions provided in our easy-to-use APIs

Register and connect SIP-based devices
Establish inbound and outbound voice calling, handling all needed SIP server, session border controller (SBC) and network address translation (NAT) functionalities
Send and receive alarm events between SIP-enabled devices and alarm receiving centers (ARC) or contact center agents
Convert between protocols for alarm and voice communication
Enable video calls with WebRTC, interworking between SIP and WebRTC devices
Play prompts as part of call flows
Record calls, with SIPRec or as part of iotcomms.io voice services
Build interactive voice response (IVR) flows

If you’re considering disrupting the do-it-all-yourself model and want to reap the benefits of a modern building practice, the iotcomms.io cloud-native communications platform has the flexibility and granularity you need.

Don’t do it all yourself – let our platform take care of your alarm, voice and video communication while you put all your focus on your solution!

Let our platform take care of your alarm, voice & video communication

Let the APIs of the iotcomms.io communications platform deliver voice and video communication in your solution. All required SIP and WebRTC signaling and media flows are taken care of, so you don’t have to!