The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella, and we are at NTCA’s annual RTIME event in sunny San Diego. Joining me is Kevin Mitchell, VP of Marketing and Business Development with Alianza. Kevin, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.
Kevin Mitchell:
Thank you very much, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Joe Coldebella:
Hey, it’s great to meet you to hopefully learn about Alianza and all the great things that you’re doing. Just before we dive into that, I was wondering if you could just share with our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, sure. Presently, and for the last 10 years, I’ve been with Alianza, VP of Marketing and Business Development, so handling all our sales enablement, marketing communications, and go-to-market strategy, including working with fabulous partners and alliances that help deliver a great customer experience to our customers. Many of those partners are here at RTIME, so having some great conversations on that. But broadly, I’ve been in telecom for over 25 years, mostly in the voice-over IP cloud communications space.
Prior to Alianza, I was with Acme Packet, a session border controller pioneer and leading vendor. And prior to that, I was with a boutique analyst market research firm called Infornetix Research and that’s how I got started in telecom.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. It’s one of those where you’ve been in terms of the revolution of the internet, in terms of what really started to be, I guess, commonplace, you’ve spanned the whole time. It’s awesome.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, no, getting to my start at Infornetix was great because there was the go-go in the late ’90s of dotcom and the Telecom Act of ’96 just unlocked all this new growth, new companies, investments, and explosion of service providers. DSL was the way to connect people. It was great to get started. Voice-over IP was just really starting then. I wrote some of the first reports and forecasts around service providers’ adoption of voice-over IP and next-gen voice.
And now 25 years later, I’m helping service providers think about the next, next-gen, which is all cloud-based. No more soft switches. No more infrastructure that they need. They can cloud-source everything. It’s nice to be helping service providers understand that transition and their opportunities.
Joe Coldebella:
Just in terms of just listening to you, it must be incredible in terms of the speed, in terms of just where we were in the late ’90s. Compared to now, it’s amazing, but unfortunately, also, some places still are underserved or unserved, which is incredible.
Kevin Mitchell:
Absolutely, and that’s what many of these service providers are addressing here in the NTCA community is they’re serving and have been for decades if not over 100 years, they are the ones that connected their communities to each other, folks within the community and businesses, but also to the country.
These service providers have a great opportunity to take their communities into the next generation of communications capabilities, which is centered on broadband, but are also a bunch of things that need to be delivered over that broadband, which includes modern cloud communications and voice-over IP for businesses, for messaging to connect with their customers, but also just folks that want to have that phone communication still to be in touch with their friends and family or conduct business. It’s still a very important piece of the community and serving those communities.
Joe Coldebella:
I think you nailed it on the head with the community aspect of it as well, and that really is the feeling here at this RTIME event. Now, is this an event that you often frequent, or is it one of those things where because of the pandemic you’ve come back in?
Kevin Mitchell:
We are just now getting back involved with NTCA. We were a little too early, frankly, when we started working with the NTCA about seven years ago. Traditional phone providers weren’t ready to think about, hey, I don’t need those boxes and blinking lights and a soft switch in my network. But things have totally changed. The vendor landscape has changed, our technology has gotten even better, and the workforce is changing.
Folks that know how to run these old phone networks are retiring, and these service providers are now ready to embrace the “cloud”. Just there’s been a broader adoption of service providers and businesses relying on cloud technologies to run their business. For voice networks, it’s no different. We are reinvesting our time in the NTCA, and we’ll be at all these future events. We’ll be at the fall conference as well.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s awesome. Just out of curiosity, was it the pandemic that was the thing that was like, hey, listen, or is it one of those things where it was a perfect storm? Technology was just on the horizon, and it was the pandemic that put a spotlight on it to make it front and center.
Kevin Mitchell:
I think it might have sped things up a bit, but this is where it was going, and it was just a matter of timing. I think we can press the window a little bit through the pandemic and changing work styles and work from anywhere. Put an increased demand on all these cloud communications and collaboration technologies and the need for service providers to have a solution that they can deliver to their communities and their customers. I think it sped up quite a bit from the pandemic, but it was always coming. It was just a matter of time.
Joe Coldebella:
I would love it if we could unpack the Alianza story in terms of where it fits in the landscape in terms of just for the providers.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, absolutely. Broadly, we’re looking at whether it’s an NTCA, rural telco, or one of the largest service brands in the world. Service providers are generally looking at new ways to grow revenue through product innovation, product expansion, and, of course, delivering a better customer experience to their residential and business customers. But they’re also looking at this collection of technology that they’ve built up over the years and it’s holding them back. And part of that, from our perspective, what we’re focused on, which is only on voice over IP and cloud communications, is the soft switch and all the infrastructure around it that’s really holding them back and not able to streamline their operations. They’re not able to keep up with the OTT, the over-the-top innovators, because they are moving much faster and are winning business customers away from them. We’re really looking at service providers or helping them really transform from being a telco to a “techno”.
That’s a broad approach that many of these service providers are taking to modernize their technology stack to deliver that awesome customer experience to their customers. We’re all about it’s time for the soft switch to go. It’s the end of its era. It was a great technology for 20-plus years to help service providers start that TDM to voice over IP transition and leverage broadband as the delivery method.
But now is the time to find a partner innovator that’s going to help them simplify things in their network, and deliver innovation on a much more regular and rapid basis so they can mostly serve the business: customers that demand that innovation around communications, collaboration, messaging, cloud meetings, all those types of things. That’s what we’re really focusing on is helping service providers dramatically transform their voice delivery to multiple benefits, including reducing costs and growing revenue opportunities.
Joe Coldebella:
Is that essentially because it’s one of those things where right now we’re at a crossroads and the legacy systems that they currently have are really going to hold them back in the future? It’s one of those things where it’s like, guys, now’s the inflection point. It’s one of those things where it’s not going to be easy, especially where… They want to switch, but it’s one of those things where there’s hesitation.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, there’s always going to be some prioritization that needs to take place, but now is the time. The technology, and the platform’s ready for our customers. We just announced in December that we’re doubling down or really being bold and saying, we’re going to invest $200 million in R&D so our customers can… Our R&D and our innovation are always between two planes. One of them is new products, features, and capabilities, so they are competitive and win more than their fair share of customers.
And then innovation also for us is about the operational service delivery side of things. How do we make things easier? How can we leverage automation? Where can our APIs be leveraged? We’re reducing complexity and accelerating time to market for service priors. We’re investing $200 million over the next five years. We’re delivering both new capabilities on the product and feature side of things, as well as that operational service delivery side.
Joe Coldebella:
I would love to pick your brain because it’s like you’re doing all these massive investments, all these other organizations are doing this massive investment, and we’ve got these fence-sitters, these folks that are hesitating and for whatever reason, not taking the plunge. What’s the pitch that you would give them? It’s just like to say, hey, guys, it’s like now’s the time.
Kevin Mitchell:
Now is the time because all these providers are thinking about broadband first, as they should. That’s where all the funding is and that’s where all the capital and that’s where all the people’s effort should be largely leveraged. We can make it easy from the migration perspective. There’s going to be some hesitancy. I need to change something or move from my existing platform. There’s some hesitancy around that migration and that project. But we have a team that’s done it. We’ve migrated hundreds of thousands of lines onto our platform from every other platform that exists, whether it’s a Metaswitch or a GENBAND, or a Taqwa type of solution.
We’ve moved it all. We’ve done it. We have an awesome team that puts together an excellent project plan and has the skills, experience, and toolset to make it an easy migration. That’s one of the things that might hold people back from making that change, but we want them to put all that effort into broadband and we make the easy button for voice so they can still deliver a compelling service to their customers.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s great. Do you think because we’re also at an inflection point with the workforce in terms of a lot of folks are going to be retiring? It’s going to be a massive brain drain, but is it also an opportunity?
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the factors that drives change and why now is that the folks that ran these voice networks are retiring. Everybody coming into the workforce that these service providers want to work on things like broadband. They don’t want to work on putting together a complex voice network, and they don’t have to because it’s an easy software-as-a-service application that runs on their broadband network with the Alianza solution.
Much less operation demand to put that together and deliver a great service, the service that their customers demand from a voice and cloud communications perspective, but they don’t need to put all that heavy lift into running a voice network anymore.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. I know that you’re here at the RTIME event. You’ve secured some customers. I was wondering if you could share those with us.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, sure. There are a couple of different use cases for NTCA members working with Alianza. One is the complete switch migration to the cloud. Everything moves over to our solution, residential voice, business, specialty lines, and all these new services they can deliver once they get onto our platform. We have some customers like that. VARCom here in California is doing that exact transition, shutting down the switch, and moving everything to the cloud.
If they expand their footprint, they acquire new companies, they can all put that onto our cloud communications platform to power their voice. And that’s where all the NTCA members will get to overtime. But there are some that are just looking, hey, I just want to launch new business services to start. Let me think about switching migration a couple of years down the road.
Joe Coldebella:
Baby steps.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yeah, baby steps, but let me get some new revenue. Let me get some new business services that I don’t currently have, whether it’s a business text messaging service or a cloud PBX, cloud communications solution, or their own branded collaboration cloud meeting solution. They look at us for those types of applications. We have some customers like that, like SRT in North Dakota and Horizon out of Ohio are both doing the exact application, starting with new revenue, and looking at switch migration down the road.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Awesome. Kevin, it’s been a great talk. As we begin to wind down, I like to ask all our guests two questions. The first one is the Back to the Future question, which I think is really an interesting one for you because you’ve been in this industry when the internet first launched, well, at least became commonplace, in the late ’90s. If I gave you the keys to the DeLorean and you could go back in time and whisper something in your ear, something to make the journey a little bit easier, or I don’t know, for whatever reason, what would you say to yourself?
Kevin Mitchell:
It’s a good question because it’s been a good journey. I’ve really enjoyed the companies I’ve worked for. I’ve enjoyed the people I’ve met during those years and the relationships that still exist in the industry. It’s great to be in a single industry for this long, which is because there are some relationships that span that whole time. But I’d say maybe be bolder earlier in my career to take some more chances, maybe even explore some different roles.
Joe Coldebella:
Fortune favors the bold.
Kevin Mitchell:
Yes, yes. I think maybe just be more confident, and be bolder in some career opportunities. But I love where I am today. I love being in the telecom industry. I love the company I’m with now, Alianza. It’s been 10 years since next month. It’s a good thing, but maybe there could have been some accelerated learning by being bolder.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure, sure, right. The paths that we go down, who knows where they’ll lead. Obviously, back to the Future question, would love to ask you the crystal ball question as well. If you could look 12, or 24 months into the future, where do you see the industry and Alianza going forward?
Kevin Mitchell:
Well, it’s been a great journey and we see the market shift. We feel it, the vendor landscape, and how legacy vendors have been cutting back from their investments and in supporting their customers. A lot of them have been bought and changed hands and have end-of-life obsolete equipment. We’re just seeing an increased pace of interest and engagement from the service provider community with our solution. We’re going to see a lot more service providers adopting the cloud.
I mean, it’s so easy for a brand-new service provider. There’s no question, they’re not building a voice network. They’re going to cloud-source their solution for voice. But we’re going to see hundreds more service providers. We power a voice for over 200 service providers today in North America. We’re going to see probably double that number in two- or three years time.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Is there anything else you’d like to add, Kevin? It’s been a great visit.
Kevin Mitchell:
It was great. I enjoyed the conversation. We’re just looking forward to really working with the NTCA providers. Again, we were a little early before, but they’re ready for us, we’re ready for them. They have a great opportunity. There’s all this focus on over-the-top service providers like RingCentral and 8×8 that are delivering cool cloud communications services and winning. They are growing business things. But businesses prefer, and we did some research on this, businesses prefer to buy their cloud communications services from the one that also delivers their broadband.
There happens to be multiple reasons for it. We didn’t capture all those types of reasons, but we suspect it’s because of the quality. They’re in the community. They’re the local provider. They can optimize for the delivery of that. It’s something like 87% of businesses, SMBs, say they want to get their cloud communications from their broadband provider if the platform’s right if they have the right features. These operators just have a great opportunity. They have the right platform.
They’re building out tremendous broadband. They’re taking advantage of all this funding that’s available. They have a great opportunity to win and retain business customers in their communities and help them grow.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Where do people go to learn more about Alianza?
Kevin Mitchell:
Well, of course, our website, Alianza.com. Check us out on LinkedIn. We’re active there sharing news as well. But Alianza.com, we have great resources, a blog that shares a lot of insights and analysis on this industry.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Kevin, it’s been a fantastic visit. That’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time, thanks for listening.
