Many players in the wholesale telecoms world have seen a need to move faster in recent times to keep up with more rapid changes in the market. A challenge has been doing that while simultaneously maintaining strength in their traditional businesses.
But this can be achieved through a measured approach that keeps sight of core skills, says Luis Benavente, CTO at global voice, messaging and cloud communications provider BTS – which powers 18 billion voice minutes annually across over 180 countries.
He believes BTS has maintained the right balance via a strategy that avoids diverting expertise from its core voice business, but also expands its service range and geographical reach through careful investments, partnerships and consolidation of teams. “Our idea is to keep growing on the voice side while leveraging that momentum to expand our portfolio to other products and customers,” says Benavente.
Getting teams together
As part of these strategies, BTS announced in October that it had fully reintegrated its subsidiary SONOC, which provides tools to optimise voice and messaging operations, including for monitoring traffic flows, improving routing and controlling fraud.
In today’s telecoms climate, BTS decided that the best way forward was to unify its technical and commercial teams to help better provide advanced end-to-end services, meeting the expanding needs of content players, big tech, hyperscalers, MNOs and carriers.
The strategy will also aid joined-up thinking and innovation to complement BTS’s development of its S1 unified platform, which offers advanced communications management systems for voice, cloud telephony, fraud prevention and messaging. This will help the company meet the needs of the latest state-of-the-art technologies, including in rich communication services, APIs and eSIMs, and with functions from voice profiling to speech-to-text technology and biometrics.
“Having the BTS and SONOC teams working together again allows us to get from business needs to development and production fast, and means innovation is quick,” says Benavente.
A further way in which BTS has been pivoting to meet modern demands is by making strategic investments, acquisitions and partnerships. As one example, BTS acquired New Jersey-based Kinecdid Networks late last year, boosting its capabilities in cloud communications, as well as capitalising on its partner’s strength in Latin America and the Caribbean.
More recently, BTS has further enhanced its standing on the cloud front by making a strategic investment in LoopUp, a multinational provider of cloud telephony services that focuses on integration of telecoms services to enhance the functionality of platforms like Microsoft Teams.
Measured integration
These types of acquisitions and investments allow BTS to keep focused on its core voice business, while enabling it to experiment with new services and models in a relatively low-risk way. Those that prove particularly successful can then be integrated into the core offering to improve the firm’s portfolio. “For us, investing in companies that are already established in new markets has been working well by accelerating both growth and market knowledge pretty fast,” says Benavente.
A further prong to BTS’s strategy is the S and BTS joint venture it formed in 2017 with Japan-based multinational holding company SoftBank. Among other things, the relationship has given BTS closer access to SoftBank-related companies and enabled it to expand its services in the Asia-Pacific region.
These include the likes of SoftBank subsidiary BBIX, with which BTS has partnered to develop services that accelerate innovation in communications-platform-as-a-service, international roaming and open connectivity.
Benavente believes BTS provides a good case study of what can be done as a voice-centric player to achieve the right balance for success through growing its portfolio to meet the needs of the future in a logical, measured way.
But he highlights the need to remain laser-focused on the core business and on identifying use cases that can then be supported by technology rather than the other way around – or, for example, creating endless APIs just for the sake of it. “We try to be business-driven and then put the technology in to make it happen,” says Benavente.
