Over the past few months, Aculab has been a sponsor here,
and to support their recent cloud-based offering, I have produced a
monthly
post highlighting
their progress. Aside from shining some light on Aculab, my broader intent
was to show how the cloud is impacting vendors from all ends of the
communications spectrum.
This is my final post in that series, and features an
executive Q&A interview with Faye McClenahan, Aculab’s Head of Strategic
Marketing. I felt it would good for readers to hear directly from Aculab about
how they view the cloud, not just as an evolution for their offerings, but how
it provides new value for their
customers. I hope you enjoy our conversation, and by all means, your comments
are welcome.
JA
Let’s start with the most basic question – briefly explain Aculab Cloud,
and tell us a bit about what’s behind your move in this direction?
FM If you are familiar with Cloud jargon, the
best way to describe Aculab Cloud in the first instance is as a platform-as-as-service
(PaaS). Our service is the availability of
telephony resources (such as play, record, conferencing, live speaker
detection, etc.) presenting the capability to deploy telephony applications
that can make, receive and interact with calls, without having to purchase the
telephony hardware or software typically required.
The
application can remain premise-based, as can the data. Aculab Cloud is there to execute the telephony
functions and to ensure the calls are handled as required, and that there are
enough telephony resources to accommodate fluctuating call volumes. When the application isn’t in use – there is
nothing to pay.
Whilst
renowned for our hardware, Aculab has always been about telephony software. Over the years, that has seen us add a whole
range of telephony resources to our portfolio.
In addition, we have looked for alternative ways in which our technology
could be used – from different card form factors, to software packaged for use on
a host processor, to our latest venture whereby the resources are made
available for use in the cloud.
JA
The cloud trend seems almost de rigueur for vendors in the
communications space now. Having such a strong legacy pedigree, what particular
challenges did you face doing this, and conversely, what particular advantages
does this confer on you compared to entries with little or no legacy history?
FM Some interesting challenges included the
management of the Aculab Development team as a ‘customer’ of one of our more
traditional telephony platforms – Prosody S.
In addition, there is an element of restructuring required to offer a
service rather than a product that you ship; however as mentioned previously,
Aculab has always been about the telephony software – whether it is loaded onto
cards, available to download onto a host processor, or through the cloud. We know telephony, we know how businesses
want to use the telephony, the challenges they face and the resources they
require in order to achieve the call flows desired – that’s what sets us apart.
JA
Other companies in this space have cloud-based offerings; what is
distinct about your architecture?
FM Greater flexibility and greater choice. In terms of your application, you are free to
run it on a server on your own premises, your customer’s premises or indeed,
you could choose to run it in the cloud (e.g., on Amazon or Rackspace). In addition, we allow you to select,
according to region, which Aculab Cloud you wish to use to maximize QoS and to
provide an additional redundancy measure.
JA
Aculab talks about being a “true” cloud offering. To help our readers
better understand how the cloud is a step forward in your business, how would
you characterize that? Also, how is this different from a hosted or managed
offering?
FM Simply put,
cloud should equate to a significant reduction in the CAPEX required to run a
telephony application as well as for the telephony resources needed to scale
on-demand. These two factors combined,
make the creation and deployment of telephony applications not only cheaper for
small development houses, but it also reduces the costs for large providers who
can handle fluctuating call volumes without having to purchase the capacity to
handle the peaks.
Whether a service is hosted or cloud-based is probably
of more interest to the hosted service provider than to the end ‘consumer’ of
the service. To the end user, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell much
difference (if any). However, for the solution provider, they will have
some service limitations in pursuing a hosted strategy rather than a cloud
one.
Offering a hosted service means that the solution
provider will need to buy servers and telephony equipment, and have specialist
staff programming, managing and supporting that equipment, power costs, the running
costs of a data centre, etc. Those costs will undoubtedly need to be
passed onto/shared with the end user.
In addition, it won’t be as flexible or scalable.
To offer a hosted service again means you have made an upfront investment into
a set number of servers (and therefore capacity). This may result in
either underutilised resources or having to turn away business because the
capacity is not available. The knock-on effect on customers is that the
capacity may not be available when they need it, or they will have to book
capacity in advance or they will simply have limitations placed on them as to
how many concurrent calls can be made. With Cloud based-deployments,
there are no such issues.
JA
For your core served market, what are you finding to be the real value
drivers and advantages? Is this different from what you expected prior to
launching?
FM Speed of development has been a big advantage
– Aculab Cloud supports high-level programming languages (Python and
.NET). That, coupled with the
corresponding telephony APIs, has enabled developers with limited telephony
expertise to write applications that meet their business requirements in a
matter of weeks. We always spoke in terms of users being able to reduce
development time by orders of magnitude and to see real-world evidence of that
is gratifying.
JA From the
customer’s perspective, what are they gaining over legacy, and how quickly are
the benefits being realized? Conversely, are they making any notable
compromises with the cloud?
FM To summarize, the main benefits include
scalability of telephony resources (so they don’t have to provision for peaks),
quick development times (no specialist telephony or low-level programming
language expertise required), cost savings (pay for what they need, when they
need it - OPEX not CAPEX). Furthermore, customers can capitalise on these
benefits pretty much from day one – cloud telephony is all about making it
inexpensive and quick to develop and deploy.
The only drawbacks I can see
concern the limitations of high-level programming languages, by nature they
restrict capability in comparison to the use of low-level languages such as C,
but complete control comes at a price – complexity, lots of code and the need
for expertise. The other compromise relates to ownership, not having
anything physical to ‘sell’. But personally I think this is a cloud with a
silver lining (excuse the pun) – as with ownership comes responsibility and
undoubtedly costs.
JA
Serving existing customers is one thing, but what about growth opportunities?
Where does the cloud take you in terms of new applications to extend your
customer’s capabilities? How about new areas – either in terms of gaining new
customers or entering markets you could not serve previously?
FM For a long time, telephony has been somewhat restricted
to the realm of C programmers and telephony experts. In turn, telephony
applications have been very complex and taken many months to write. With Aculab Cloud, we took the opportunity to
provide higher-level programming languages, wrapping a number of tasks into
simple call functions. Not just to speed
up the development time of existing customers, but also to allow a wider range
of developers to add telephony to their toolkit. That step means a new market,
encompassing, for example, vendors of broader-based business applications,
rather than just telephony applications – the realm of existing customers – has
opened up. The idea of telephony being inclusive to business processes through
integration, similar to the concept of unified communications, is attractive on
a wide market sense.
JA
You’ve been doing a number of things to educate the market about the
cloud and its value proposition. In what regards have you been successful so
far, and where do you see the biggest knowledge gaps or misconceptions?
FM The biggest misconception for me is the idea
that buying your own telephony equipment will be cheaper in the long run than a
pay-as-you-go service. Consider the comparison between renting and buying a
car. The argument goes that for short-term use, a car rental is cost-effective,
because you only pay for what you consume. The clincher seems to be the
statement that if you drive frequently and/or for longer, owning a vehicle
makes better financial sense. Does it, indeed?
To buy the
analogous car, you first need a deposit, typically thirty percent of the
purchase price, which is a non-trivial investment, assuming you don’t have to
borrow the cash in the first place, in which case the proposition becomes even
less attractive. To retain ownership of the car, you are then committed to
paying the balance of the price of the vehicle, in monthly instalments, over an
extended period of time, not atypically several years.
During that
hire purchase contract term, you are also likely to take up a maintenance or
service package, which may or may not include provision for consumables e.g.,
tyres, and you may even extend the warranty for an extra monthly cost. All that
sounds like pay-as-you-go masquerading as CAPEX, does it not.
At the end of
the term, you own a car. However, the car is worth far less than you paid for
it and probably no longer ideal for the task for which it was first procured.
So you buy a new car and if you’re lucky, the residual value will suffice for
the deposit on the new one. It’s exactly the same when it comes to telephony
deployment choices – when looking at costs, you have to consider the true OPEX
for the equipment/service you have purchased.
JA
Voice is at the core what you do, and the cloud does hold promise for exciting
innovation. As your cloud offering matures, where do you envision the
breakthroughs that will take voice in new directions?
FM Voice is often portrayed as inferior, the
poor relation, if you will, to other modes of communication – outdated perhaps.
Certainly, we have all become accustomed to and embraced SMS, IM, chat, even
social media channels as an alternative, in some ways preferred, method of
communicating. But even with all these new forms of communication, there
is no escaping the pre-eminent position voice enjoys when wishing to fully and
properly convey meaning or to understand a nuanced message. VoIP and Skype were
breakthroughs as was virtualisation, which led to cloud, but in terms of voice,
the common element is people talking to each other, which is unlikely to
change. We may use voice less, for some of the more mundane activities and
where it’s socially acceptable to use other means, but ultimately, people will
always want/need to talk. Future breakthroughs are likely to be in the realms
of user devices and transport, with, perhaps, revolutionary set up times and
call quality issues coming to the fore after years of suffering from poor
quality cell-phone calls.
JA
What about the bigger picture; namely your vision for Aculab’s cloud
roadmap? How much are you focusing on making the development of today’s
applications faster and cheaper, as opposed to being more transformational, and
pushing into new areas that legacy solutions simply cannot address?
FM We have already pushed into new areas by
providing high-level APIs – it has allowed a whole new generation of developers
to add telephony to their tool kits. Making it easier for people to add
telephony or use telephony to aid their business work flows will always be an
objective. Easier means faster and faster means cheaper, and, in terms of
ROI, the result is wholly satisfactory for the developer.
Reducing the
cost of utilising telephony is also a key focus, where we understand that our
volume customers are under price pressure from their competitors, which filters
all the way through to the demands of their users and/or subscribers. At
present, we are focusing on a number of typically expensive and resource hungry
technologies, such as TTS, ASR and Fax. When you place these in a cloud
context, where resources can be pooled, shared and utilised on demand, suddenly
technology that may have been limited to large corporations becomes accessible
– both viable and affordable – to SMBs.
