We spend a lot of time thinking where the puck is going.
I was always taught business is about adding value and solving problems and I honestly believe that is best achieved in this day and age by enabling the latest and greatest technology.
More specifically, that means creating the platform on which others can build great businesses (or “enabling awesomeness” as our marketing team would say). I think that is borne out by M&A in our sector – pick a high value exit in recent times of a disruptive operator and the odds are they were a Simwood customer. Our customers are deeply leveraging the APIs we’ve made available to them since before the term ‘API’ existed. They are embracing the same open-source technologies we champion, and, in Charles’ case, works on the development of. They are doing things right.
Of course, they’re layering their own genius on top of our services and giving their consumers what they want and need, in the way they want it – our only contribution is the foundation.
Now picture the opposite, the zombie company who got lucky 15-20 years ago, hasn’t grown and has made some really questionable technology choices when they last made a choice. Mentioning no names I can think of several but I can also tell you this – nobody has bought them, they aren’t Simwood customers, and they probably don’t care about APIs or innovation because they’re just milking a dying cow for all she’s worth.
Which persona are you?
Last week was quite surreal for me because similar differentiation goes on at the carrier level. In a week where we announced more features to save our customers money and make their businesses more efficient, and made yet more progress on where the puck is going (Conversational AI for one), others made some announcements too.
BT boasted they may be smaller than anyone thinks because of how many staff they’re going to get rid of in the name of AI. Way to motivate talent guys! Although based on what we hear about staff morale in the former state-owned monopoly, there may not be room for it to go any further south. Our approach to AI is to fully embrace it to grow our productivity and enable Simwood to scale without needing loads more people – same coin, total opposite side. We seek to leverage it to improve our service and experience, not just replace the human factor in a race to the bottom – a lesson Klarna recently learned the hard way.
We are heading into the most rapid period of change in human history and people I respect have described AI as more significant for humanity than fire. Sure, it is terrifying, but if as a leader in this space the best you can come up with is how many staff you can fire in the vain hope of staying viable, I pity you.
Another, the darling of the sector, who we like and respect so I won’t be too rude, also had some news. They’re now selling SBCs! Yep, while we innovate the SBCs out of our customers’ stacks so they can improve agility, save money, and get feature sets more recent than the 90s, they are now selling the hardware that locks customers into the past. If you still dream of a 12 disc auto-changer for the boot of your purple Granada – Spotify will never catch on – they’ve got a treat for you. One could say it is a good way of ensuring your customers cannot consume the features you can’t provide and so might well turn out to be a stroke of genius. Kind of like selling them a windowless room so they can’t see the change going on in the world, and can’t get out to join in even if they hear it.
But, the real biscuit was taken by an alleged competitor whose recent announcements seem to have an uncanny sense of deja vu for us. They routinely respond to posts on this blog with their virtue-signalling newsletter, justifying to their zombie customers why doing nothing, but saying the right thing, is the best course of action (when not writing what seem like weekly RFOs that read like a Ron Burgundy teleprompter malfunction). Speaking of which, in the last three years (since the Telecom Security Act came into effect), none of those appear to have reached the incident reporting desk of the sector regulator. Pete will tell you that Ofcom’s incident reporting guidance needs improvement, but, based on what we’ve seen and been told by mutual customers, there’s a definite whiff in the air. Funny for one so overtly virtuous. Anyway, I digress.
This time, while defending never upgrading anything (and even recently admitting to not applying security patches which they are legally required to do), they’ve re-invented the SIP trunk – maybe this is something that could grow revenue for the first time in the last decade? Yep, in the name of anti-innovation they’ve added support for a custom header – something we did in two minutes way back in early 2016. Wow!
So the message here seems pretty clear to me. If you’re already with Simwood I hope we’re looking after you and you’re making the most of the things we’re doing to make your journey easier and more productive. If on the other hand you want to get locked in the past, or moreover are nostalgic for simpler times that you never want to change – the kind where the glory days of phoneboxes are pined after – then we’re not the choice for you. If, on the other hand, you feel misaligned with your carrier, frustrated at their lack of respect and support for you, and craving some oomf, give us a call (or even Jay, our conversational AI) because we’d love to work with you and add you to the long list of successful innovators that have worked with Team Simwood.
