There’s no doubt that the telecom industry has become fiercely competetive. Not only due to more suppliers entering the market but also thanks to new technology and evolving needs. Within cloud communication, suppliers are more diverse than ever before. Telephony was previously linked to the behemoth local suppliers, and all the more VoIP based and global. But with SaaS and CPaaS players emerging, the landscape is changing that makes it all the more important to have a competitive edge. This doesn’t just boil down to who has the lowest prices anymore, you need to on top of your innovation game to be able to meet evolving consumer and business needs.
Today we see far more startups and small companies that operate internationally without big offices. As clients, these don’t necessarily look for huge telephony systems but want something that is easy to manage and more geared toward their customers. This is where Cloud solutions came into play as it offers to integrate telephony into favoured apps or provides a customized platform that includes favoured integrations and applications. Previously, company software was sold on-premise and needed to be physically installed and maintained. This often resulted that companies granting access to technologies by purchasing a license. But without necessarily knowing the benefit or how many were actually using it. With SaaS and CPaaS, an alternative model was created for cloud communication, that instead focuses on the benefit and amount of use. This model allows companies to pay per use or month for their services that are immediately delivered over the cloud. With this type of model, companies instead need to motivate their users to maximize their use of the telephony service without actually buying it.
Facebook breaks new ground in cloud communication
Facebook is beyond a shadow of a doubt an innovative company. They supply their services continously through the cloud and due to their revenue being based on ads, their primary goal is for users to continue using their “services”. So instead of selling a big company license up front, they sell their services by the millisecond to billions of users simultaneously. The driving force here is user engagement. This is something we see as an obvious trend equally among suppliers such as Slack and Dropbox. Because the more they focus on the time their users spend in their products, the more they’re able to add usage and upp-sell.
What Facebook does really well is targeting users attention to grow. And they do this through three primary ways;
- By measuring usage to optimize current products
- By building new products that drive more usage
- By integrating with other applications
It is already obvious that many SaaS and CPaaS providers, being more or less in the same market, are driven by a similar strategy for cloud communication. But when we take a closer look at this, it is interesting to see how a Facebook model, and its likes may affect the telecom industry. For example, will more of its services strive to become or look more like social media, or vice versa? Maybe this is perfectly aligned with the digital age, in that together with globalization, we also see a globalization of technology where everything has begun to weld together. Since social media is a proven successful model in B2C and C2C, we can expect to see more companies implementing similar strategies for the same market segment in the future. With such a model, we can also expect to see a more diverse user groups and suppliers that are more adapted to their customers instead of the other way around. Suppliers might be able to reach users they might not otherwise have, and this in itself can result in changed marketing strategies that has a broad rather than narrow approach.
The success of social media is due to the fact that it has a better reach in and breadth in terms of revenue potential aimed for the C2C and B2C markets. On the other hand, Slack and Teams, for example, provide great value for the B2B, and are still incredibly popular tools in corporate communication. What does pose a question however, is what the future holds. What solutions will look like that will actually succeed in connecting C2C, B2C and B2B. Maybe cloud based communication and telephony solutions will look more like social media, like a business version of Facebook. Or maybe the other way around, time will only tell.
Dstny as a CPaaS-supplier
We focus on businesses whether large or small and strive to meet different types of consumer’s needs. We consistently take in our customers feedback and actively work to develop new services and add integrations that meet different needs. We inherently understand that everyone is different, and that one size doesn’t fit all. We therefore strive to have a solution that can be suited to meet different needs. From a complete solution with PBX and add-on services, to creating a customized platform where you pick and choose services and integrations that suit you best. This allows our users to truly create a solution that is both tailored to their overall business strategy as well as their customers.
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