Unified Communications Featured Article

Telnyx Gears Up For ITEXPO

By Alicia Young
Web Editor

Unified communications have been a game-changer over the past few years. Since becoming mainstream, UC has enabled work processes and communications to become much easier. Employees are able to work on the go and remotely without having to worry about missing out on important information or not being able to reach coworkers if need be—they get all the perks of working in an office, without having to sit at the same desk every day.

UC is just one way technology has changed for the better over the years, though. The growing prevalence of APIs, messaging capabilities, security, MSPs and more have all changed businesses for the better recently.

One company right in the thick of all these changes and improvements is SIP trunk provider Telnyx. The company offers next generation solutions that are sure to revolutionize communications. Telnyx is excited for the future of tech, and will be exhibiting at ITEXPO, held Feb. 8-10 in Fort Lauderdale, FL, at booth 329. Telnyx CEO David Casem will also be taking part in a panel at ITEXPO (News - Alert) titled “What MSPs Need to Know About APIs,” which will take place Friday, Feb. 10 at 9 a.m.

To prepare for ITEXPO and the insights Telnyx will inevitably provide to those who stop by its booth, TMC caught up with Mclain Roth, business development, Telnyx. Our full exchange can be seen below.

What elements of Unified Communications (News - Alert) are most useful for your company?
As a SIP Trunk Provider, we empower Unified Communications by giving providers the ability to integrate and manage all of their voice (and soon to be messaging) needs through a single pane of glass. By de-bundling voice services and exposing everything through a RESTful API, Telnyx allows you to “Be Your Own Carrier” and build communications into your platform with ease. We also incorporate UC within our own application. For example, instead of having to pick up the phone and dial a number, you can phone our support team directly through your browser with a simple click of the mouse.

 Are you using messaging technologies to communicate with your customers?  How, or why not?
We leverage messaging to provide real-time alerts to customers for payments, low balances, traffic alerts and more. Additionally, we will be introducing SMS/MMS as a service via the Telnyx Mission Control Portal in 2017. This will enable our customers to send/receive messages and leverage the API to incorporate messaging within their own applications and workflows, providing new ways to enhance customer service. We’ve benefited immensely from communicating with our customers using SMS/MMS, and we want to make it easy for companies of all sizes to do the same.

Are you leveraging big data/analytics to operate more efficiently?

At Telnyx, we recognize the value of analytics and have dedicated a team of data scientists to help identify bottlenecks in operations and improve our processes. This team is responsible for building and maintaining a reliable data pipeline that allows us to gain insights into the business and continuously develop our products and systems. One example of this has been the ability to improve call quality by enhancing our routing engine. Whereas most carriers simply least cost route your calls, we are able to account for vendor performance and consistency to dynamically route calls along the highest quality path.

Furthermore, we will be looking to push our own data analytics to our customers to provide them additional insights. Instead of simply providing invoices and monthly spend reports, we will offer our customers actionable data regarding their account configuration and call metrics. Imagine receiving real-time alerts and reports that offer suggestions on how to improve your service while providing the data that supports the decision. This will include:

Reports demonstrating the savings available through switching some of your numbers to channel billing

Graphs that show trends of call volumes versus answer rates and reveal peak hours (possibly indicating the need for more/fewer agents to answer calls)

Alerts letting you know whenever ASR, ACD, Call Attempts, etc. deviate from their historical trend

Breakdowns on spend per connection that indicate which of your customers are costing you the most and eating into your margin

Projected spend and traffic using regressions of your historical usage and trends

As a carrier, we have access to a ton of telecom data and would like to leverage this resource to not only improve the quality of our service but also the management and user experience for our customers.

Content marketing has become a hot topic recently.  Have you defined a content marketing strategy and how has it helped you build your business?

Yes – we strongly believe that having a robust content strategy, working on our overall brand and voice and becoming a thought leader is a major competitive advantage especially within a niche market like ours. At the same time, our industry is evolving from a device-centric to a more app-centric, self-service model, and knowledge through content consumption is an integral piece of this trend. This is why we want to make sure that we’re providing relevant, useful content pieces to our clients.

We’ve onboarded our Digital Content Manager who’s executing a strategy throughout our online distributed presence to reach existing and potential customers, and we’re very excited. We’re ramping up our VoIP blog, which will eventually evolve into a robust resource center.

How have the growing number of high-visibility security breaches impacted your outlook on security?  Which breach is of greatest concern?

One of the more common attacks the industry saw in 2016 was DDoS. Although these attacks do not directly breach security, they can be extremely disruptive. Often times, a DDoS attack can be used as a smoke screen to distract the target from recognizing the real hack that is occurring. Other times, a DDoS attack can be aimed at taking down someone’s network by simply overloading it with garbage traffic. As a carrier, you take on the additional burden of not only being responsible for protecting customers’ information but also having their businesses depend on you for day-to-day operations. Your customers require you to maintain services and they cannot afford to go without phone service. This makes DDoS attacks particularly tricky as you cannot just close your doors to all traffic and wait it out. You must be able to withstand the attack and ensure that there is no security breach occurring under the cover of the smoke.

At Telnyx, network security is something we’ve always taken seriously, and the increasing trend of breaches provides a constant reminder of why we must continue in our efforts. We know that this business demands high availability, and we need to put ourselves in a position where we can eliminate downtime for our customers. This means building diversity, redundancy and resiliency throughout our network infrastructure and continuously educating ourselves to remain up-to-date on the latest threats.

To what extent are you leveraging APIs to enhance business opportunities?
There’s a reason we’re a platinum sponsor for the event, and it’s because, at Telnyx, we really are All About the API. Everything we offer on our Mission Control platform is exposed via our public communications API. This means that all of the features and services Telnyx has to offer can be integrated into your own platform via API - searching for a number, purchasing a number, enabling E911, building and configuring SIP trunks, etc.

We know that communication is changing. Everything is going toward an application-centric model rather than the traditional device-centric model. Communications providers are leading this movement in creating new platforms that allow for end-users to truly experience unified communications all within a single application. However, in order for these new UC solutions to be built, there needs to be an easy way to integrate carrier services into the application. By exposing the Mission Control platform via RESTful API, we give providers the tools they need to Be Their Own Carrier. To make things even easier for developers, we’ve made our API accessible through interactive documentation that allows you to hit all the endpoints and test directly within our documentation.

How has the growth in the managed services market impacted your business?

As more and more businesses turn to managed service providers for handling their telecom needs, new challenges have risen for the MSPs. One of these challenges is finding the best way to manage all the additional accounts and services associated with them. As an MSP providing voice services, you are constantly interacting with your carrier to provision new numbers or SIP trunks and modify configurations as needed. As a result of this growth, we’ve seen a number of MSPs turn to the Telnyx Mission Control Portal.

Our VoIP platform makes it easy for MSPs to manage multi-tenant communications environments. By enabling instant provisioning and configuring - not to mention API integration - MSPs can avoid bottlenecks and points of failure with carriers and instead, have the power to Be Their Own Carrier. Furthermore, our customizable real-time reporting can help displace some of the OSS/BSS by providing insight into usage and spend as needed.

What are your thoughts on containerization technology as an alternative to traditional virtualization?
As a startup, we strictly used cloud/IaaS then adopted containers as a standard interface to develop, test, build/package, deploy and run a majority of our infrastructure having transitioned to microservices. For Telnyx, all aspects of the application lifecycle benefit from containerization. Containerization is another tool/capability, not necessarily an alternative to virtualization.

What are you most looking forward to at ITEXPO 2017?
We’re really excited to be fully participating in this year’s ITEXPO. Although we’re sponsoring the event, we’re really looking forward to meeting new people at our booth (booth 329!) and assisting them with our Virtual Reality Experience. We also can’t wait to walk around and discover what the other companies are offering - maybe a revolutionary new technology or even a unique conference booth setup would pique our interests.

Our CEO and COO will be in panel discussions this year, so we’re looking forward to seeing them in action. Of course, we’re also delighted at the thought of gaining new insights from the other speakers at ITEXPO, so we can’t wait!