Alianza and Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a multi-year partnership to enable traditional communication service providers to deliver and monetize voice and cloud communications services.
The deal, outlined at AWS re:Invent, also highlights how AWS partners to take workloads in key markets and verticals. Alianza's Dag Peak, Chief Product Officer said the joint Alianza-AWS combination has been deployed in more than 100 communications service providers (CSPs). These CSPs, which include Lumen, Brightspeed and Viasat, are moving from traditional voice networks to more nimble cloud platforms.
Alianza, which raised $61 million in financing Oct. 31, offers a cloud communications platform for service providers that replaces legacy systems so providers can provide cloud meetings, collaboration and other digital services.
According to the companies the combination of Alianza and AWS will include the following:
- Lower costs and simplified operations by replacing soft switch voice over IP networks and legacy hardware with unified communications as a service platform.
- Improved customer service via digital automation and control over customer experiences.
- The ability to launch new services built on Alianza and AWS.
- A unified view into operations via a software-as-a-service interface.
- Upcoming tools so CSPs can offer new generative AI services via Amazon Bedrock and other AI services.
I caught up with Peak to talk about the CSP market and how it's migrating to the cloud.
The market. Peak said the traditional telephony market is still large, but often forgotten as vendors have moved up the stack to communication and collaboration apps (think RingCentral, Zoom, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams). "In markets where we play well, we don't have many competitors. There's very little interest in smaller service providers," said Peak.
The need for cloud platforms. CSPs need to move as they transform from phone companies to focusing more on communications. "These CSPs can offer a full stack of services all living in the cloud," said Peak. "AWS is interested in Alianza because our platform is allowing CSPs to offer a full stack of services in the cloud and it can pull in the workloads."
Transformation. CSPs don't want to rebuild the traditional services, but modernize everything they are doing, said Peak. However, Peak noted that transformation for CSPs starts with traditional voice services with AI because many customers are mobile and don't want to communicate via apps. Alianza's services are delivered via CSPs to customers via an eSIM. "Not everyone is sitting at a computer. Small businesses rely on telephones," said Peak. "We want to enable AI for the hair salons, insurance agencies, and flower shops."
Use cases. Peak said it's possible to bring tools like sentiment analysis and experience tracking to small businesses. "Contact centers get all the AI love, but we can use AI far down market with AWS integrations," said Peak. The goal is to bring enterprise grade AI services to mainstream businesses without an app.