Telestax Blog

Commercial CPaaS Providers Are NOT Service Provider Friends

The CPaaS market is really heating up. This is great news for all participants because it means that organizations are beginning to realize the power and benefits to be had from real-time messaging and voice communications. What it also means is that Twilio is becoming a household name. Twilio and other commercial CPaaS providers make their money the same way service providers make their money – moving communications traffic (SMS and Voice calls). Make no mistake, the commercial CPaaS providers are definitely competing with Service Providers – and they are going after your enterprise customers. Virtually every dollar made by a commercial CPaaS provider is a revenue dollar lost by a service provider. Even more important is that when a commercial CPaaS provider makes its way into one of your enterprise customers, it will be next to impossible to unseat them. Every application they place within your enterprise customer takes them further away from you. This blog is about how service providers can leverage CPaaS market readiness, protect themselves from the commercial CPaaS providers and profit from the increased traffic on your network that real-time communications applications send. Why would Service Providers not be jumping on the bandwagon? It is because the CPaaS business model is a departure from today’s service provider business model.

And It Is Time To Jump

Enterprise organizations are definitely looking at CPaaS. Departments within these organizations have different problems they need to solve and are currently looking for a CPaaS provider to help solve them. Typically, these departments do not get together and offer a RFP that satisfies the organization as a whole by selecting a CPaaS provider upon which to standardize across the company (remember the database days?). Rather each department will find a CPaaS or single point solution provider that satisfies their current specific need – paying no attention to their future needs and to no other department need. Once they select a provider and build their app, it is very difficult to unseat this platform. This is not only costly for your customer; it becomes a management nightmare for their IT department and/or head of Telephony to manage. But most important, the traffic that is pushed from these new applications is over another commercial network and not yours. You just lost revenue – and control of your business relationship.

This does not have to happen. Telestax wants to help you win against this disturbing trend. Telestax service provider partners have good business relationships with their enterprise customers. They currently own the customer so they have an advantage out of the gate. All that is needed is to embrace the enterprise customer, make it easy for them to utilize the service provider CPaaS offering and difficult for your customer to make a business decision to go to another vendor.

I believe that this is becoming a common concern for service providers around the world. Which raised a question in my mind, how can we empower the key advocates that service providers have long lasting relationships with – and at the same time, help them manage all of the use cases that are headed their way. Wrestle the cat to the ground so to speak.

The Service Provider Health And Wellness Plan

It is important to note that Telestax is not a commercial CPaaS provider – we are a CPaaS enabler – a huge difference so please bear with me.

You are a Telestax partner and we have CPaaS enabled you via our RestcommONE Cloud. This means you are not only a service provider; you are also a CPaaS provider. You now offer and operate a multi-tenant CPaaS. And we can do this in as little as 2 days – with zero pain. As part of your ongoing relationship with your enterprise customers you provide them with their very own virtual CPaaS platform that is hosted and managed by you with Telestax help. Essentially, you are giving them their own CPaaS “account”  within your RestcommONE CPaaS platform. This is the equivalent of what has often been called a Communications Application Server. Typically, these have a high cost associated with them. Together we give them access to their CPaaS account that they can now use and standardize across all of their business units who are in the process of creating new use cases and services.

Here is a relevant blog that talks about how CPaaS is the Glue for Enterprise Stickiness.

Circling The Wagons

This plan provides your customers what they need and it lets the IT and Telecom groups easily manage (read control through standardization) all requests.  Their CPaaS instance comes with pre-negotiated rates for voice and SMS usage over your network. It becomes a co-op of sorts! Every enterprise that pushes traffic through you benefits everyone – higher traffic means lower costs for everyone. It all drives deeper volume discounts – a win/win for everyone – but mostly you.

We are currently working with a visionary service provider who has hundreds of Enterprise customers. In one enterprise customer, I found their handful of use cases showed a pathway to 100M transactions a month.  This is based on departmental use cases that were uncovered. If this is the platform for HR to interact with new job applicants, logistics alerting people when things get delivered, inbound support automation with SMS and chatbots, the use case list goes on and on.  It can all be accomplished with a single platform that supports your business model. I believe service provider’s enterprise customers will see a ton of value – and at very little cost to the service provider. Together we then play the long game and capture 100% of the incremental revenue of every new use case they come up with by becoming their default CPaaS Omnichannel solution.

The Commercial CPaaS Trend Is Not Going Away But Your Revenue Might

Ignoring the commercial CPaaS provider market is a huge mistake. When they win you lose. They are coming after you through your enterprise customers. Working together with Telestax is easy and it will provide you with far more opportunity than risk.

Contact us now to protect your enterprise customer relationships and increase your revenue stream. We are expecting you.

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