By Simon Woodhead
We blogged recently how the industry was (and wasn’t) evolving, and the disconnect there. Today we’re announcing an upcoming feature which helps those who recognise the need for change, but are encumbered with a legacy platform, such as global incumbents who want the agility of Simwood, on their own network, wherever in the world it may be. This also works for those who like what Simwood offers but are beholden to a legacy operator for one reason or another, or wish to expand into new markets where we do not have a network.
For years and years, customers have asked us whether they could map third party numbers to the Simwood platform and we’ve resisted. We’ve said: if you want a number on our network, port it to us. I’ll admit, that was dinosaur thinking and ridiculously short-sighted when our customer wants service in Oman or Brazil, or any other country we’re highly unlikely to seek a licensed position in. It is also short-sighted in respect of our home markets where some people genuinely enjoy weekly outages and funding race-horses for part of their number estate (or more likely are prohibited from moving it) but want a unified software stack that has seen investment beyond the year 2000. Our dinosaur thinking was us falling into the ‘lines and minutes’ trap so much of our industry remains in, and frankly scared of cannibalism. That isn’t like us.
We may have market presence and infrastructure in the largest and 5th largest economies in the world but they have relatively small populations and neither are on the economic ascendant. The growth and the progress is in other regions, and we’re drawn towards growth and progress. We’re not about to seek a licence in China, India or Brazil though but there’re several billion people who could potentially benefit from what we offer. Equally, our amazing customers want service in other countries without being driven to deal with a pretend “global” operator who is going to take numbers off them as soon as their regulatory oversights and lack of infrastructure are found out. Instead they can deal directly with a real local operator, potentially even one who is another Simwood customer.
So if you hadn’t guessed it, on our Q2 road-map is opening Simwood up for BYOC. BYOC2tC technically! We have SIP in and out of the network obviously, but tied to a number which is on-net. We’re enabling calls in and out the network without being tied to a legacy PSTN number. An incumbent operator in any country on earth, with a legacy SBC stack, can hairpin calls through Simwood and benefit from routing or service features such as call-recording or OPUS transcoding at carrier scale. A UCaaS operator already working with us can take numbering in new markets (or old!), map it to Simwood and have calls routed and handed off in an identical fashion to now. A traditional telco in our core markets can host their numbers off-Simwood but benefit from our full-stack of features in presenting service to their customers; they can even buy another operator in another country and use us to integrate them! A mobile operator can offer value-added services to their own subscribers, such as call recording or transcription, with files being securely and compliantly deposited in their own storage. And many many more.
This is part of our any-to-any routing that we’ve referred to as our global potato and part of our mission to be the Swiss Army knife of voice and we think it is huge. That is all we’re saying for now as we intend to release this in beta in Q2 but we’re already having major conversations with serious global players and would love to talk to you too.
Please add yourself to the waiting list below if this is a feature you’d like early access to.
