Communications service providers (CSPs) have never been more important than they are today as the entire world is challenged to address the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Given the mandate to physically distance to stop the spread of this highly contagious disease, families and friends, businesses and enterprises, government agencies, healthcare providers, educational institutions and more have no choice but to opt into digital services to stay connected and stay productive.
It has been awe-inspiring to see CSPs - large and small - rally to support the “new normal” and a world of increasingly virtual interactions that have stressed, but not broken, communications networks, including the public Internet and virtual private networks that run over the Internet.
In fact, CSPs and application service providers are leading the way when it comes to remote working, online learning, telemedicine and enabling families to meet via video to celebrate holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and other special occasions.
CSPs tremendous response to COVID-19
Around the world, CSPs have responded with a heightened sense of purpose, empathy and intensity, and in the context of the urgent need to find ways to keep the world moving, innovating in real time. As part of their tremendous response, CSPs are:
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Providing broadband access to underserved communities, setting up secure networks in field hospitals and coordinating with partners to provide tablets to healthcare workers who are doing their best to keep families connected with loved ones in intensive care units when physical presence is not possible.
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Working with local governments and schools to ensure students can attend school online, supporting educators with the tools they need to teach from home and coordinating on long-term solutions given the uncertainty about the ability for schools to open anytime soon.
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Supporting healthcare organizations to immediately ramp up telemedicine and telehealth solutions, making it possible for patients and their care teams to interact remotely. This includes remote consultations when patients become symptomatic, which has relieved pressure on emergency rooms and over-run testing facilities by triaging cases online.
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Responding to the need to move contact centers to the cloud in days - not weeks or months - literally replicating a physical contact center where hundreds of agents used to go to work and can no longer do so by bringing virtual desktops and systems to millions of individual agents’ homes. These contact centers have been challenged by massive growth in call volumes, including government agencies now handling health insurance claims, unemployment claims and more.
To support all of the above - and to secure remote working for businesses who are now meeting in virtual collaboration spaces instead of traditional conference rooms - CSPs are rallying to extend network capacity by 30-50%, and the industry is happy to support them. For example, LogMeIn, a market leader in remote work, including solutions for unified communications and collaboration, is leveraging key solutions from Ribbon’s comprehensive cloud and edge software portfolio to help meet increased network traffic demands.
Accelerating digital transformation
Unlike travel, hospitality and other industries, the telecom industry has been less impacted financially, and are actually experiencing growth spurts, particularly in the real-time communications and collaboration fields with browser-based voice, messaging, video, screen-sharing and co-browsing solutions. Unified communications (UC) has evolved rapidly to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and communications platform as a service (CPaaS) offerings.
Hundreds of CSP customers are accelerating their digital transformation so they can support the digital transformation of their enterprise customers, while thousands of enterprise and SMB customers are accelerating their digital transformation as they learn that remote working can be just as productive - if not even more - than traditional models where employees commuted to a physical location to work. Across the board, there has been a high demand for richer, more consistent experiences that are also highly secure.
Providers across the industry are having important conversations with customers about how they can save money given the sudden and unexpected recession we find ourselves in. With continued pressure on operating expenses, there is a renewed sense of urgency in shifting to cloud network architectures and more automated network operations. They are also addressing a huge demand for the deployment of open networks that can be scaled up and down, with more orchestration and agility.
Finally, cybersecurity has never been more important as an increasing number of adversaries and criminals take advantage of the pandemic, driving the demand for security across all network applications - including voice and video - to protect assets and confidential data and to reduce the risk of ransomware and other threats.
Better together, through connectedness
Moving forward, it is clear the only way we can get through the COVID-19 crisis is together, through connectedness. We can continue to expect massive shifts in the telecom industry as we work hard to enable enterprises, SMBs, government agencies and consumers to survive and eventually thrive.
Working remotely has not only become a nice to have but “must have.” The key is quality tools, with security built in, along with creative and progressive management styles and systems. What we do know for certain in this unsettling time is that those who have already invested in high-quality and high-scale online collaboration and productivity platforms are finding it easier to keep work flowing and their businesses growing.
At Ribbon, we are working with partners like IBM to offer their global enterprise customers free cloud-based unified communications and collaboration technology on the IBM public cloud. The offering enables IBM clients to rapidly adopt Ribbon’s carrier-grade Kandy UCaaS offering, via the IBM public cloud, to work from anywhere.
Ribbon is proud to be a leader in delivering efficient and convenient online working environments through our UC, UCaaS and CPaaS solutions, which make it possible for teams to gather virtually and rally to keep projects moving. Unlike consumer services, our solutions work on extremely secure networks and when accessed via the internet, WIFI, enterprise or mobile networks, allowing teams to safely work digitally in virtual private domains.
To help in this regard, Ribbon introduced our Work@Home offering, which delivers advanced remote working capabilities to enterprises and contact centers of any size. Our Smart Office platform, which is a key component of the Work@Home offering, provides screensharing, HD video, whiteboard, group chat, conferencing and more on both desktop and mobile clients. Fully functional licenses are available from select partners free of charge until June 30, 2020.
Together, with our customers, channel partners and technology ecosystem participants, we are proud to contribute to combatting COVID-19 by supporting social distancing, while also preparing for a new and better way to work that has many benefits – including more time working, less time commuting, dramatically lower operating costs (including real estate) and, above all, support of life-saving innovations.
