Most of the premises-based UC vendors selected their path to the public cloud via one or both of two primary routes. One path is to directly host a public UC-as-a-service offer. Avaya (SMB), Digium, NEC, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, and ShoreTel have taken this route.
These firms expanded their businesses to include direct hosted services. For most, it was a significant undertaking that turns the vendor into a customer of its own technologies--and that's just the start. The hosted offer is a direct alternative to its premises-based business, thus the firm must also inherently address product cannibalization and potential channel conflicts.
The major alternative path is to repackage and optimize existing UC products for service providers and carriers that are interested in delivering a UCaaS solution. This strategy was adopted by Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Mitel. This route is more in-line with the product model, thus less disruptive to the core business. It offers a quick means to benefit from the current demand for cloud services with lower risk.
Aastra took a third route of wholesaling its Clearspan solution--as a service--to carriers. Clearspan is Aastra's carrier-grade, scalable, multi-tenant solution based on technology from BroadSoft. It's been offering Clearspan as a premises-based solution to large US customers for several years, and discovered demand exists to also offer it as a service.
The basic problem, or as Aastra determined, the opportunity is that the UC engine is only part of the hosted solution. Service providers offering UC have had to cobble together many more components and skills such as geo-independent data center resiliency, billing systems, 911 services (and liability mitigation), self-service provisioning portals, fraud protection, number porting, tax compliance and other government requirements, and many other aspects associated with running a mission-critical hosted UC service.
The vendors that adopted the first path described above (directly hosting the service) have all gone down this complex route--as have many other service providers that purchased the core UC softswitch for a UCaaS offering. Many would argue that the UC softswitch is the easy part of the proposition.
Now that larger organizations are exploring hosted options, carriers are finding it difficult to bid infrastructure that hasn't been built-out yet. As a result, some are turning to Aastra for Clearspan as a service. A recent government win, under a carrier's logo, is rolling-out quickly in Florida. Aastra is even gaining traction with carriers that have their own branded hosted UC offerings.
Tim Whittington, Aastra Regional Group President for North America, says "hosting a comprehensive solution is far more complex than one might imagine. We've developed a process and solution that allows us to efficiently scale. A carrier can partner with us, demonstrate the solution, and scale rapidly after winning the business--with proven carrier-grade service quality and clearly defined costs." Aastra expects to see many seats deployed in the near future--with what Whittington describes as a "partner's brand and Aastra's brawn."
That's the case with Internet2--a consortium of higher-education and research facilities that is making Clearspan available as a service. Aastra is hosting Clearspan for Internet2, and bears the cost and ownership of the platform. The solution is expected to pay off as Internet2 UC deployments expand. Aastra is currently rolling out a 10,000-seat university it expects to complete (start to finish) in two months.
The concept isn't entirely new. Wholesale cloud services are commonly implemented by service providers for resellers. Resellers create their own branded cloud solution, while the provider benefits from economies of scale. Additionally, several major vendors offer managed services which outsources operational responsibilities. Aastra's twist is wholesale services that include all the components (design and management) of a hosted UC service solution for very large implementations.
Aastra developed its OpEasy provisioning system initially as a back-office management tool. Cloud-scale necessitates self-service tools, so it was re-envisioned. Aastra flipped OpEasy to face the customer to become a self-service portal.
In addition to the core infrastructure service, Aastra also makes available its own IP SIP phones and its BluStar endpoints (devices, applications, and mobile clients) which are integrated into the Clearspan solution including voice, presence, and video communications. Aastra also offers advanced contact center and unified messaging solutions within the portfolio. The carriers bundle these services with their own network and hosted services into a single scalable cloud service.
Aastra is working with multiple carriers and currently rolling out services to several government institutions. The firm realizes it is on to something and is productizing its offer to accommodate a variety of large customer implementations within government, education, and enterprise markets
Dave Michels is a Contributing Editor and Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz.
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