Cloud Telephony Is At A Take-Off Point, But A Poor Regulatory Environment May Yet Derail It

Cloud Telephony Is at a Take-off Point but a Poor Regulatory Environment May Yet Derail It.
 

- Venkatesha Babu

BigBasket is the most well funded online grocery startup in India, having raised a cumulative of $246.5 million from well-known investors like Ascent Capital, Bessemer Ventures and Abraaj Group. BigBasket operates in a hyper-competitive business where margins are razor thin but scale is expected to make up for it. It competes with the likes of Grofers, ZopNow and Amazon. To stay ahead of competition, BigBasket needs to ensure that its customer experience and communication is flawless.

Didn’t get that exact variety of daal (pulses) you ordered? BigBasket needs to hear about it and address the issue through its in-house contact centre operation. Customer feedback is too important an aspect of its business to be outsourced. The cloud telephony partner who has worked with BigBasket to scale up from a few hundred customers to serving millions is a little known company called Ozonetel.

In the past when companies had to scale their telecom systems they had to invest crores in buying EPABX hardware from the likes of a Cisco, Avayya or a Genesis. Telephone lines had to be configured and extensions provisioned.

Today, if you want to scale from 10 telephone lines to 10,000 lines it can be done in a matter of minutes through the magic of cloud telephony. What happened to IT infrastructure – where one had to earlier buy servers, racks and other hardware to grow – with the introduction of cloud computing, is happening to telecom infrastructure. Capacity can be added on tap. Which is why cloud telephony is also called hosted telephony. The hardware can be hosted anywhere but services could be provided wherever required.