Interview with Jonas Cedenwing
We had a chat with Jonas Cedenwing, Co-founder of Telness who recently joined Telness Technologies as the CEO, to talk about their products and collaboration with iotcomms.io. Read the interview with Jonas to see what he has to say!
Jonas Cedenwing, Co-founder & CEO at Telness Technologies
Jonas, can you tell us a bit about Telness and Telness Technologies?
Telness started out as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) selling mobile subscriptions and cloud-based PBX solutions to Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Swedish market. During the first five years or so, we built our own technology platform to support our business. It succeeded well and from the very beginning we’ve had the highest customer satisfaction ratings of all operators in Sweden (4.8 on Trustpilot). Other operators in the market observed what we were doing, and shortly after we started to get requests from them to use our platform.
The idea of reselling our unique telco platform white-label on a Software as a Service model has been with us for a long time and now felt like the right time to put it into practise. In Spring 2021 we founded Telness Technologies who’s now the owner of the telco platform first built by Telness, We’ve already started to approach potential customers and so far this has been very successful!
Tell us about Telness Technologies products
We have two main products. The Digital Telco on Demand is a complete end-to-end platform tailored to other operators who want to launch a new, fully digital brand. If they choose our platform, they can get started quickly at a low cost of ownership. This is especially important for so called “fighting brands” or” challenger brands” that compete mainly based on price and simplicity rather than functionality. What’s unique with our platform is that the entire purchase process is automated – checkout, number transfer management, activation, sending out SIM cards etc. All of which was previously done completely manually. This gives happier customers but also happier staff that can focus on creating value rather than doing manual work.
The other product is our Next Generation PBX, that we sell white-label to operators and other companies in the telco space who want to provide a simple way for their B2B customers to handle incoming calls. We target customers who want to offer a simple exchange solution under their own brand. This service is unique since it is cloud-based and fully digital. The end-user is usually up and running within 5 minutes after purchase which is unique in this industry.
What has been important when building your products?
We have always looked at things from the customer’s perspective, it’s in our culture. Before we started to build our platform, we created customer journeys for all parties involved in the purchase and sales process. We always involve our customers in the development of new functions and improvements – from the first sketch to the final product – and prioritize our backlog based on customer feedback. This is one of the main reasons why customers like us, they feel heard.Why did you choose iotcomms.io as your provider?
When we build our products, we want to own as much as possible of the logic ourselves and be able to further develop at our own pace. There are many other providers who deliver static solutions, but we were not looking for that. It was important for us to find a flexible platform where we got access to low-level APIs.
Also, we were familiar with the founders and their solid experience from telecommunications, and we trusted their ability to deliver functions that would suit us. We knew that Jörgen is a guru, which influenced our decision as well. The iotcomms.io platform turned out to be a perfect fit for us.
How do you use iotcomms.io in your products today?
We have built a Next Generation PBX platform using serverless functions in the iotcomms.io platform and we access the functions via direct integrations at API level. iotcomms.io provides signalling and media, and we control what to do with that information. All logic around what happens during a call is on our side.
Before we started working with iotcomms.io we already had a PBX solution with active customers running on it. Initially all existing functionalities had to be reproduced to efficiently migrate our customers to the new solution. During this process we worked very closely together, and we still develop a lot together through a common roadmap. It works very well!
What are iotcomms.io’s strengths – as a company and platform?
A crucial factor for choosing iotcomms.io as a provider, is that the platform is 100% cloud native and runs on AWS. Now that we have phased-out our legacy exchange solution, all our services are 100% cloud. There are many solutions that claim to be cloud or hybrid, however, this is often not true. Since we white label and resell our product, it’s important for us have the option to scale up quickly when needed.
Furthermore, our collaboration has been very strong since the beginning. Always having someone with solid industry expertise to talk to has been a strength and has helped us to move forward quickly. If we had chosen a more standardized platform instead, and bought signalling and media handling on tap, we would not have had access to the same kind of support during the projects. By solving problems together, we can jointly drive the entire industry’s solutions forward.
The platform’s flexibility is also very important to us. The low-level APIs gives us more power to do what we want. Another aspect of flexibility is that we can decide the roadmap together.
Would you recommend iotcomms.io to others?
Absolutely! Both as a company and the services you provide. We have now been up and running with thousands of active customers for more than six months and we have been very happy with how everything has worked since we went live.
You have global expansion as an expressed goal going forward. How do you see the potential for global success?
Very high. We have a good sales pipe and many positive dialogues. The interest in this type of service is huge and we clearly differentiate ourselves from our competitors. The telecom industry has an extreme technical legacy. Almost everyone has a strategy to digitalize and offer exactly what we have to their customers. We give them the opportunity and flexibility to do just that.
Becoming 100% cloud based was a necessary step in our expansion – it’s important that we can enter new markets quickly with our services. For other companies that sell similar products but are not cloud native, it takes too long for the customers to get up and running.
iotcomms.io is a significant part of our expansion in the way we use your platform. For us at Telness Technologies, it’s top-notch!
Are you looking to build a cloud-PBX solution?
ABOUT TELNESS TECHNOLOGIES
Telness Technologies offers cloud-based telecom solutions for companies looking to enhance innovation capacity while reducing cost and complexity. The product offering consists of an end-to-end Digital Telco on Demand as well as a White-label Private Branch Exchange (PBX). These services are the backbone of the operator brand Telness and are continuously developed based on real customer feedback and data analysis.
