Service Providers and The Risk of Inaction 

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” —Ancient Proverb

As service providers look ahead and plan their future product strategy, many are taking a wait-and-see approach—particularly when it comes to their core value-added product: hosted or cloud-based phone service for business customers. This is especially true for service providers (SPs) still using older-generation, network-based feature servers to deliver services. 

First, let’s talk about why this wait-and-see approach is risky. 

• Customer needs have changed. Over the last 5+ years, as remote work flourished and products supporting distributed workforces rose to prominence, what customers require for business communications has changed significantly. Traditional hosted PBX (private branch exchange), once sufficient for most business needs, has been supplanted by collaboration-focused services offering tools like video meetings, group messaging, and document sharing. That trend shows no sign of slowing. 
• Vendor inaction has created a significant product gap. Service providers have largely used in-network feature servers to deliver hosted telephony. Vendors supplying these feature servers—think BroadSoft and Metaswitch—have struggled to keep up as customer needs evolved from basic phone service to unified communications (UC). This has been amplified by merger activity at both vendors, resulting in strategic shifts that deprioritized new feature development. 
• The competition has heated up significantly. Brand-name “over-the-top” (OTT) unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers like Intermedia have kept their products aligned with the changing market. They’ve also moved quickly to integrate artificial intelligence (AI)—something that’s nearly impossible in a traditional feature server environment. The result: these OTT providers now view your customers as prime targets—and a key source of growth. 

Summing up: many SPs have a customer base that needs modern collaboration tools, no easy way to deliver them, and aggressive competitors at the door. That’s a problem that needs immediate attention. 

To address it, SPs need to take a hard look at their current technology provider. As you evaluate yours, make sure they have a strategy to get you to a market-competitive solution. A few questions to ask: 

• What’s the roadmap? What’s the plan to get you a competitive UCaaS solution—and a commitment to ongoing improvements? 
• Where are they with AI? How do they plan to integrate AI into their UCaaS and contact center as a service (CCaaS) offerings? What business functions are they targeting? 
• How will they support your evolving needs? What go-to-market resources and sales support are available? Will they help you close complex deals? 
• What happens to financial terms as you move to the cloud? Will you continue on the same perpetual licensing if you move to the cloud? 

Making a methodical, well-considered decision is important—but right now, time isn’t on your side. Every day you’re in-market with a subpar UC product is a day you risk losing existing customers and missing new ones. 

If you don’t believe your current vendor can get you where you need to go, we at Intermedia would love to talk. 

Brian Gregory

Brian Gregory is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia Communications. He has responsibility for guiding Intermedia’s service provider marketing initiatives, including product strategy, content development, business analytics, and go-to-market execution. Brian has held various roles in marketing and product management at communication service providers and technology concerns, including Ribbon, Metaswitch, and Sprint.