Ahh..a new year. It’s amazing how this time of year brings a sense of renewed hope and optimism. It’s like our mind plays this trick on us and allows us to lay out goals, some new, some old, and we are able to tap into energy to help us chase these goals. From weight loss to exercise to…whatever.  

So, here we are. Heading into the last two weeks of 2017.  A year that has seen the continued consolidation in the telecoms marketplace. From the A# Routing & Rating schema in the EU to the spate of mergers in the U.S. It’s been an interesting year.

We’ve all been there, right? Just when we think we have things all locked down and things are running “smoothly” in our interconnect voice operations, we discover there was some underlying, unnoticed problem that is starting to wreak havoc on our network, our margins, our finance, our sales, etc. It’s like a headache that is constantly recurring.

Seems crazy, but I can’t tell you how many times we hear comments that go something like, “Who cares about wholesale voice?”, “Voice doesn’t matter anymore”, or “Why should I care about voice, let alone interconnect voice?”. We get it!

Can you believe we are less than 45 days away from 2018? The second decade of the 20th century is coming to a close. Just think about where we have come from and the technological advances that have been made in the communications industry. From flip phones to BlackBerry, from IM to SMS, from BlackBerry to smart phones, etc.

In interconnect voice, the grind is non-stop. You often hear professional baseball players talk about the grind. They play every day from early February through the end of September. It’s hard competing every day, doing the same things.

Ahh..here it is. The kernel of it all. In interconnect voice, this is the central component. The keystone of the doorway. The root. The nucleus.

LCR, Least Cost Routing, Routing, Dynamic Routing, whatever you want to call it, it’s the core of interconnect voice. It’s where all of the business, operational, network policies, and performance metrics are distilled into the basic/fundamental question that is continuously asked in interconnect voice, that is, “how should I route this call”?

You know what? This interconnect voice industry is complex. Why is that? I mean, yeah..it’s a razor thin margin business with massive transaction volume and massive data management requirements.

We had an interesting discussion the other day. We were analyzing all of the features we pack into our ICP solution.

Ahh, the telecommunications voice marketplace. Particularly, the interconnect voice segment has long been rumored to be, in a word…dead. But it’s not true. To borrow a term, it’s “fake news”.

So interconnect voice, as we all know, is incredibly complex. Long gone are the days of simple interconnects and Least Cost Routing (LCR). Today’s interconnect voice marketplace requires sophisticated tool sets and expertise.

Say it with me...AUTOMATION! Okay, we have gone on and on about scalability, reliability and speed of performance as must-haves when it comes to interconnect voice management platforms.

In the annals of interconnect voice, there was this “old way” of doing things that was called, “Least Cost Routing”, or “LCR”.  Remember that acronym?

So, let’s see…we are nearing the end of 2017. As voice communication service providers perform some reflective introspection, one area that they should have already started addressing is their interconnect voice operations.

So, we have spent many hours both in this forum and with customers and prospects discussing and analyzing the pros and cons of homegrown interconnect voice management systems.  Look, we get it.

As all of us working in this industry know first hand that we have experienced disruptive technology and marketplace evolutions (actually revolutions) since the introduction of VoIP in the mid 1990s.

So, our industry is a little crazy isn’t?  If you have been in the “game” as long as we have, you’ve seen it all.  Great fortunes made and lost, sweeping/disruptive technological advances, regulatory constraints removed,

So, this interconnect industry has undergone rapid evolution and disruptive change. While the basic premise still exists (carriers exchanging voice traffic

Okay, so, when you do an analysis of vendors, how much value do you place on their reference customers? A lot? A little? or somewhere in between? I have to tell you, we think it should be a lot.