The fast-growing demand for cloud communications solutions by all companies worldwide is creating a huge opportunity for telcos and carriers that have had a trusted relation with large enterprises for years. One of the key technology providers helping telcos provide such services is Ribbon Communications. This fast-growing telecom technology provider helps carriers with network infrastructure and security but also empowers them to provide UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS services under their own brand.

Patented building blocks

Ribbon is really a combination of a lot of companies together that invested very heavily in real-time communications. The big pieces being Nortel Communications, Genband, Sonus Networks, Edgewater Networks and ECI Telecom, all merged together in the past decade. All combined Ribbon have about 400 patents in real-time communications, which have been decomposed into communications APIs to make the technology more easily available for contextual communications.

KPN API Store

What Ribbon are doing that is special is making that full-featured communications platform available to carriers, in a white label and wholesale manner. The heritage is really building and supporting the infrastructure for the large carriers around the world and these days that includes enabling them to provide UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS services. This way carriers are able to compete with companies like Twilio and Vonage without heavy investments by themselves. The example of the BeterDichtbij healthcare video is supported by KPN API Store in the Netherlands, where they have an API marketplace where they offer Ribbon speech and video APIs, so that their customers, such as BeterDichtbij, can using and building communication technology. it in their applications.

AT&T

Another example is AT&T, probably one of the largest carriers in the world. They took a different approach where they came to Ribbon for a white label on the entire CPaaS communication service because they’re tired of having value sucked out of their network by new OTT players like Twilio. So there is a unique place for carriers to be able to get into this space and really leverage the heritage they’ve got in terms of quality of service, a trusted relationship with really large enterprises. AT&T are even taking it a step further as they’re looking at all of the service numbers of customers that they’ve got, and developing solutions that provide a better level of service rather than just providing that call for free.

Richer experience

The challenge these days is to be able to offer a richer experience to customers. So what AT&T have done is take what Ribbon calls Life Support, and allow their customers’ customers to be able to reach into a call center with a WebRTC frontend from the web, combine that with an AI chatbot, and when necessary promote that video call to an agent who’s got the full contextual communications available to help the customer. The unique thing here is that AT&T adds video on top of an existing setup, requiring very minimal changes and thus able to make the change very quickly, just what is needed in these special times.

Use case: Ribbon Communications

Please check out the SmartCom Summit 2020 trend report (use coupon code SUMMITGUEST for free access) to learn more about CPaaS and the opportunities for agile enterprises and telecommunications service providers, read about some telcos that are already offering CPaaS, and find out how a telco can easily add such services to their portfolio by partnering with the right technology and service providers.

Or watch the CPaaS discussion of the talk show, or the entire talk show.