Voice enable your collaboration platform: Have your cake and eat it, too

It’s frustrating to hear “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” And with a legacy telephony platform, that’s kind of true. You could invest lots of time and effort with IT teams, telecom engineers, and vendors to create customized solutions. However, as the cloud adoption trend continues and core infrastructure like communications move to cloud platforms, you lose that customization, flexibility, and control that you’ve spent so much effort to create.

Fortunately, many unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers have realized there’s a real need for nimble solutions when it comes to communications. Many UCaaS providers today allow you to simply plug-and-play with different communications providers. This allows you to keep all flexibility of your public switched telephone network (PSTN) carrier – your cake – and enjoy the benefits of advanced cloud-based systems – eating it, too.

Voice enable your collaboration platform

This plug-and-play solution is known as bring your own carrier (BYOC) or bring your own telecom (BYOT).

You keep your choice of telecom service, structure, relationships, and contracts. You gain flexibility, benefits, apps, and the agility of a cloud service. Simply put, you can keep your current carrier and infrastructure while adding future-proof reliable cloud applications. This strategy provides immense convenience.

BYOC background

When big tech players saw the demand for solutions that they didn’t offer, they opened their doors to partners who could. They created formal programs to pre-approve solutions that work with their systems (like IntelePeer has done with Cisco Webex Calling and Microsoft Teams). This partnership is known as bring your own carrier.

The primary reason UCaaS vendors approve BYOC is because it sets up an IP telephony network offering a high grade of network availability, redundancy, and ownership of numbering authority. Enterprises still rely on a high-quality voice service.

UCaaS vendors’ core competency is software in the cloud, while service providers’ value includes network, voice, and data services. This is another area where you can have the best of both worlds. But, specific benefits expand beyond just flexibility and control.

Why choose BYOC?

Bring your own carrier is a great option for businesses that want to maintain the flexibility gained by managing communications separately and the control to be able to manage your company’s transition to the cloud. This transition can be done at your own pace. Flexibility and control aren’t the only benefits.

Plain and simple, BYOC can save your business time and budget, as well. Connecting your current providers to your unified communications (UC) platform allows you to maintain existing contracts, avoid termination fees, and avoid large porting projects to move numbers to different providers, simplifying management.

Bring your own carrier allows you the flexibility and control to manage your communications separately from your UC platform, while still maintaining a seamless end-user experience. Allowing for a multitude of benefits:

• Calling plans, call routing, and forwarding
• Flexible pricing models
• Keeping existing phone numbers
• PSTN support and relationship with carrier
• Maintaining existing contracts
• Overcome complexities of a rip-and-replace transition
• Better control over disaster avoidance and recovery plans
• No pain or hassle of porting numbers to different providers
• Ability to build your own customized communications solutions using the providers you want for different things (core communications infrastructure, software as a service, etc.)

BYOC indeed means you can have your cake and eat it, too. It provides control and flexibility for future growth without the frustration, cost, and effort of switching communication providers.