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VoIP application provider Alianza teamed with AWS to help telcos transition their legacy telephone infrastructure to the cloud
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The deal is mutually beneficial, helping Alianza tackle bigger clients and AWS lock down juicy telecom workloads
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The collaboration could also help smooth the path as Alianza develops new features using AWS services
Alianza has been working for a few years now to get smaller Tier-2 and Tier-3 operators to ditch traditional telephony in favor of its cloud-based voice-over-IP (VoIP) application. Now, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on its side, it’s hoping to get its foot in the door with Tier-1 operators as well.
According to Dag Peak, chief product officer at Alianza, the freshly announced partnership is a mutually beneficial one. Alianza gets to pitch its services to telcos with AWS by its side, while AWS gets to vicariously scoop up a heaping helping of telco workloads it otherwise doesn’t necessarily have a mechanism to capture. Win-win.
“AWS is happy because they are selling us lots and lots of services,” Peak said. To be more precise, Alianza’s VoIP app uses 36 AWS services, ranging from its API gateway, Athena and Chime to Lambda, Glue and its virtual private cloud. “So, AWS loves this.”
For those of you following Alianza and its VoIP heritage, this may seem like a big shift for the company but a source close to the company who asked not to be named told Silverlinings, "This isn't a big shift, it's big acceleration and bringing a solution to larger operators with joint GTM [go to market]." The source added "There are many more non-UC lines in the world and the larger, established operators have end of life infrastructure running them. They need a place to land those products." It's these opportunities Alianza is looking to scoop up with help (and brand recognition) from AWS.
Gartner VP Analyst Sid Nag told Silverlinings the partnership "will definitely move the needle for Alianza rather than going solo in the space, especially in the telco world which is very hard in general." He added that beyond AWS' infrastructure scale, Alianza can benefit from "the GenAI and other capabilities of the AWS cloud full stack."
Climbing to the cloud
Alianza used to offer voice services via its own private data center infrastructure. But Peak said about five years ago, the company noticed two key trends that were bound to collide. The first was telecom’s shift away from hardware and toward software-based workloads. The second was the migration of virtually all compute workloads to the public cloud.
Thus, he said, with all telco workloads suddenly becoming compute workloads and all compute starting to move to the cloud, Alianza decided to get ahead of the curve. It began building a new application in the cloud and in 2021 launched its full-stack cloud communications platform.
Asked why it went with AWS, Peak said Alianza brought its idea to both Microsoft and Google, but a partnership never materialized. However, Amazon saw an opportunity.
“We finally got them to realize that the service providers have a set of workloads that are going to be very challenging for AWS to scoop up themselves, but are not challenging at all for Alianza to scoop up,” Peak explained, referring to legacy voice infrastructure like border controllers and soft switches.
“All that old crap sitting in those service provider networks were big juicy, meaty workloads that Amazon had no wherewithal to be able to go get themselves,” he continued.
Alianza, though, already had the industry know-how to have those conversations with providers as well as the application to get them into the cloud. “All of that came together in this press release," he said.
Evan Kirchheimer, Omdia's VP of Service Provider Research and Media, told Silverlinings that in the broader migration of the telco stack to the cloud voice has "has been sort of ignored; it’s a market in slow decline, but one which delivers rich margins" for service providers. Now, though, things are coming to a head as service providers grapple with the decline of legacy skillsets required to maintain voice infrastructure and licensing issues related to their legacy softswitches.
"I think there is a market for Alianza’s solution with Tier-1s and -2s in the U.S. This will depend on how these telcos view their residential and small business voice markets and their relationships with some of the competing vendors," Kirchheimer said. "It will also depend on the pressures I’ve outlined in terms of skills and licensing, and how they are felt by each SP. For the right segment and customer needs, Alianza could be a good fit." And having AWS on its side will allow Alianza to "punch above it weight" in conversations with interested telcos, he added.
In addition to getting to leverage AWS’ name in conversations with service providers, Peak said the partnership also means Alianza will get an enhanced level of service and support from AWS.
Silverlinings’ sister site Fierce Telecom recently reported Alianza is working to build a new AI capability for its application which will allow small businesses to glean insights from AI-based sentiment analysis of phone calls. To build that feature, however, Peak noted that Alianza’s developers need to stitch together capabilities from AWS tools like Bedrock, Polly and Lex.
“I could go do all that because I’ve got smart guys in my development shop, but it’s also really nice to be able to call into the AWS folks and say ‘hey guys, here’s our application, can you help us stitch this together?’ and they go ‘heck yeah, we love AI,’” he concluded.