Never Discount the Power of Convenience

Whenever I look broadly at my career in telecom, one area that always amuses me is the extent to which our collective business enjoys its peculiarities. Sort of like our own secret handshake society full of unique terms and abbreviations like AIN & ANI, DDI and CLID or CLECs and POTS. After all, the Bell System used to formally publish a list of abbreviations and acronyms. Maybe it is just in our DNA?

Unfortunately, the way we order and buy telecom services seems to have inherited some of our industries’ penchant for the obscure. When an organization needs telecom services, the norm is talk to a call center agent or even schedule a personal visit with a salesperson and sales engineer. Many in our industry still feel that ordering telecom services is too complicated to be done online... In truth, I think a fair bit of that belief reflects old habits rather than actual reality.

Think about the auto industry, there are 13,500 makes and models of NEW cars; that equate to millions of buying options. If you include trade-in possibilities, the potential model combinations grow into the hundreds of millions. Yet, I can go online to CarSaver.com and choose from almost any make or model, get a price, buy it (with financing and or trade-ins) and have the car delivered to my local Walmart for pick-up. Yet, we often tell our customers that ordering a SIP trunk is simply too complicated to do online.

In fact, one company in telecom has never subscribed to a belief that telecom is hard, their business model has been predicated on making telecom easy. Twilio, since its inception in 2008, has been an online company. When it launched Elastic SIP Trunking in 2014, it defined its key differentiation saying, “Twilio’s SIP trunking provides a different approach, with trunking instances provisionable on demand, inbound numbers available in 50 countries, and a significantly richer feature set”. Over the past seven years, they have leveraged that differentiation, grown to offer a consistent set of SIP Trunking services across 100 countries, and become one of North America’s largest SIP trunking providers.

Organizations of all sizes have embraced the convenience and speed of Twilio’s website and instant deployment model. While a select few service providers have made strides to catch up, many have done comparatively little to change their selling model. Today, Twilio is still the market leader in terms of breadth and depth of services available instantly online.

Jump ahead to 2021, to a workplace dominated by cloud-based collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams. As CIOs and IT managers look to telecom enable Teams, where will they turn? It is easy to imagine that many will simply Google their Direct Routing options for Teams and land on the Twilio site.  In minutes they will be Twilio customers. Buying decisions will be reduced to seconds from weeks or months. Services deployed in minutes.

At Ribbon, we believe that part of that instant Teams Direct Routing buying experience must include a Ribbon Session Border Controller (SBC). That’s why today we announced our certification with Twilio’s Elastic SIP trunks. Our organizations have worked closely to be sure our combined solution securely connects Microsoft Direct Routing to Twilio Elastic SIP trunks to enable Teams calling around the globe.

Ribbon and Twilio - Certified Solution for Microsoft Direct Routing

Ribbon’s public cloud solutions install in minutes from AWS or the Azure Marketplace. Not to mention our monthly “as a Service” offering for Microsoft Teams, Ribbon Connect. The same convenience that drives Teams customers to a Twilio Elastic SIP Trunk will drive them to a Ribbon software, hardware or public cloud-based SBC.

All of Ribbon’s eSBCs include an Easy Configuration Wizard with pull-down options for popular cloud services like Teams and dozens of popular PBXs along with popular SIP trunking providers. Connecting Teams to a Twilio SIP Trunk, couldn’t be easier. And if you do opt for a public cloud-based deployment, Ribbon’s SBCs are up to two times more efficient than competitors, meaning you won’t pay as much for monthly cloud infrastructure, which is convenient for your wallet…

As organizations accelerate their use of Teams for business phone services, we believe that Twilio will see its online purchase and deployment model resonate with busy IT professionals. Our goal is to make securing that Direct Routing, even when it includes integration with a legacy PBX or legacy devices, just as easy.

Watch the video to learn more about Ribbon’s Direct Routing solution