On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 07:56:29PM -0600, Colton Conor wrote:
hey our API supports it, but you have to hire a developer to make it happen.
Definitely a tangent from the original thread topic, but: How can [any small to medium] service provider afford NOT to hire a developer? There's little choice but to to innovate if you want to stay alive?to develop clever and original applications, user experiences, and improved, telecoms-assisted business processes that redound to the customer's bottom line. That means more than putting a logo and colour scheme on someone's me-too white label, or meandering within the narrow band of things you can squeeze out of your equipment vendor's consulting arm. This is where open-source wins big because of its myriad integration paths, but proprietary platforms that offer good API coverage are also usable. I'm not saying Class 5 switch platforms are mere SDKs or toolboxes. No, the expensive ones provide a relatively solid foundational skeleton of marketable features. But turning that into a viable business requires making them talk to other things. It also requires backoffice/OSS-BSS integration, automation, EDL, etc, etc. IThere's not much you can sell without developers. You can slap your logo on canned Broadsoft-type POTS / Key System replacement crapola, but that's a sprint straight to the bottom. If you just employ traditional ops/infrastructure/rack-stack gophers/switch techs/provisioners people who can't write a line of code, and perhaps some process/provisioning/ordering people besides, and your lunch will be eaten by a small oligopoly of large companies with more or less exclusively sales-driven cultures. They can bury you on price for a me-too POTS/PBX/who cares offering. Unless you've figured out how to be the next Time Warner or whoever, and bigger than they are, you have to think different. I'm not saying service providers need to become software engineering-rich shops. The balance will probably always tilt toward infrastructure/ops. Furthermore, the best developers want to work in culturally engineering-driven organisations, all other things being equal. Still, even if you luck out on a switch platform whose canned features you can sell without integration, there's so much strategic importance today in backend process automation, tooling and APIs. A little bit of core competency in the development arena has a _huge_ impact on cost structure and gross margins. So, I don't really understand when I run into service providers that don't have any developers of any calibre on staff, even for the care and feeding of the backoffice and/or business layer. Huh? -- Alex -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 (direct) / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/