Vic Bozzo, Chief Revenue Officer of SONOC

SONOC

With COVID-19 has plunged the world into the unknown, it has also shown that people can change their lifestyles positively with the help of technology. The ongoing digitalization of modern life causes consumers from every corner of the world to leverage the perks of online transactions.

As such, SONOC, an agile telecommunications solutions provider, takes advantage of evolving technology by developing software driven solutions to improve business efficiency.

To learn more about this topic, Inside Telecom conducted an interview with Vic Bozzo, Chief Revenue Officer at SONOC.

Can you tell us more about SONOC’s business strategy and how it generates revenue from its solutions?

SONOC provides a modularvoice and messaging management platform to OTTs, carriers, and a range of service providers. We combine a unique set of capabilities, API’s and cloud resources into a single efficient platform that enables users to maximize revenue and margin while reducing resources, complexity, and cost.

In a competitive voice and messaging market, we’re giving users the ability to optimize their cost base and simplify their operations. We’re putting them in control of their voice and messaging traffic and giving them the tools to succeed in a new era in voice.    

Could you further elaborate the importance of Application Interface software (API), especially during the pandemic?

Our customers want the ability to spin-up new services and capabilities in a dynamic elastic way and incorporate them into their existing systems. There’s a drive towards new flexibility and agility in the services they are deploying.

Unlike other voice and messaging management platforms, we remove the need for an “all or nothing” approach to platform deployments and replace it with an agile model for building a component-based architecture. RESTful APIs can be accessed by our customers via a simple online library which enables instant plug-ins to other applications.

I think the pandemic has shown a lot of businesses that they need to be able to pivot and turn up services faster and adjust to new market conditions and paradigms in their communications strategy. You need to be ready to change how you operate quickly and APIs are essential for that.

How is your business strategy helping carriers to use APIs to enhance their existing systems?

With our programmable API capabilities, carriers can choose what they want to integrate and deploy. We enable users to spin-up capabilities associated with advanced routing, traffic management, bilateral management, billing, quality monitoring, fraud control, cloud-based SBC and switching, as well as many others.

Our RESTful APIs give them full control at a granular level, of all features available in the platform. That is more of a software-centric approach to voice and messaging than the

traditional closed telco environment we’ve seen in the past. We developed the platform with an API-first approach and now we are opening those options to our customers directly.

What other software driven solutions do you offer telecom operators and tech companies to improve their business efficiencies?

We’ve integrated OSS/BSS and switching into the same platform, which means users don’t need to deploy and manage multiple solutions. That removes an operational headache and brings voice and messaging management into one holistic environment.

When you have integrated services on a single platform, you can capture new business intelligence that supports planning, management and optimization while increasing visibility.

Our customers are looking to simplify operations and we help them to reduce resources needed to manage their voice and messaging businesses and increase margins. That’s critical in a market that is changing quickly and becoming increasingly competitive.

How does SONOC set itself apart from its competitors?

Our modular approach, RESTful APIs, and the integration of switching into our platform differentiates our business immediately. We also offer both voice and messaging management with a single user experience.

That’s a big demand coming from the market. There are carriers that are duplicating management, billing and invoice systems for both voice and messaging. This is inefficient and costly. They want to do it all in one platform, and even better they can use whatever capabilities they want with APIs.

We’re also seeing a growing number of voice players looking to get into the business messaging market or A2P aggregators that want to add voice capabilities to their service portfolio. That’s an ideal scenario because we can offer one platform for supporting both services.   

Our suite of solutions has been built by users for users, so we’re continually shaping and evolving our offering to meet their needs. We listen and develop the solutions that they need.  

In your opinion, what are the key aspects needed by operators to evolve and adapt in an ever-changing industry?

Carriers need to think about their operations the same way OTTs do about theirs, and OTTs need to find better ways to work within the carrier infrastructure to get better last mile QOS.

Carriers should be building API ecosystems and focusing on plugging in capabilities to create systems and processes that are more than the sum of their parts. Traditionally they have built systems themselves or deployed single purpose solutions; this is complex, costly, and difficult to scale.

At the same time, they should be automating as many of their processes as they can. Automated processes remove human error, reduce resources, and increases agility. You want to maximize speed and efficiency through automation. To be successful in today’s voice and messaging market, you have to change your approach.

As you already know, there have been many issues raised regarding data privacy, could you briefly walk us through SONOC’s privacy policy?

SONOC takes protecting your information very seriously and in strict compliance with applicable data protection laws. We process and our cloud is optimized to segregate identity data, traffic and location data and electronic communications metadata.

SONOC has a firm commitment with the protection of personal data and the privacy of our users, so to guarantee the security and to protect the personal data obtained, we carry out all the technical safety measures necessary to prevent their loss, manipulation, diffusion or alteration.

How does your platform help with monitoring traffic flows, improve routing, automate rate upload, and control fraud?

Our platform includes advanced routing, quality monitoring and fraud control to tackle all these issues. Advanced routing allows customers to make business decisions in real-time, improving the business margin, assuring voice quality and traffic optimization, in automatic or manual mode.

Quality Monitoring gives a real-time switch traffic visualization that facilitates immediate problem detection and troubleshooting. It operates independently of the protocols used for calls. We also provide a comprehensive ‘Health Check’ of the traffic being passed over your network with the ability to detect various fraud/issues and raise red flags by performing tests and real time monitoring to improve your detection and prevention strategy.

We are also working very closely with the existing and emerging standards bodies that are focused on new fraud control initiatives including Shaken/Stir as an example.

What challenges are you currently facing within your market?

Over the last year, we’ve seen the voice and messaging market adapt to lockdowns and quarantines caused by COVID-19. There was an initial uptick in voice traffic when lockdowns started in early 2020, then traffic migrated to OTT services as users started using Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

It shows how fast the market can shift and how demand can change. Carriers need to be ready to adapt and they have to be focused on efficiency and integration to these new platforms.

We’re trying to help our customers to maximize the potential of their businesses in a new era of voice and messaging and that’s what our solutions focus on. We’re giving them the tools they need to be successful in a market that can change overnight.

As an industry veteran, what will you be bringing to the table for SONOC? What gaps will you fill?

I’ve seen a lot of the ups and downs of the industry over the last 25 years. What has remained constant is the time I spend talking to customer and users. I love to discuss their challenges, understand the opportunities they want to pursue and find solutions for them.

This is why I can’t wait for in-person events to kick off again and get out in the industry and share what we’re doing at SONOC.

I think people will be surprised by the hard work we’ve done behind the scenes and the value we can deliver for Tier 1 carriers and OTTs through to emerging players across the globe. We’ve got a great team and a real vision for voice and messaging. It’s an exciting time to be a part of SONOC and it’ll be great to tell more people about what we’re doing.