According to a recent McKinsey study, the pandemic advanced the digitization of internal operations by three to four years. Now, with industry requirements, standards, and consumer needs changing by the day, businesses are seeking ways to "catch up" digitally for fear of being left behind by the competition. For many companies, specifically small and medium businesses (SMBs), the solution to this problem comes in the form of managed service providers (MSPs).
An MSP delivers services, such as network, application, infrastructure, and security, via ongoing and regular support and active administration on customers' premises, in their MSP's data center (hosting), or in a third-party data center. Today, MSPs usually manage the IT infrastructure and IT processes and applications for clients, ranging from user devices and computers to firewalls, routers, switches, active directory, exchange servers, active directory servers, and data servers.
The MSP industry saw record numbers in 2021, reaching a market size of USD 242.9 billion. And with digitization not going anywhere anytime soon, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.9 percent over the next five years. With this steady growth, predictions put the market size at USD 354.8 billion by 2026.
However, while this growth is fantastic for MSPs in general, this rise in prevalence has also come with its strains. MSPs haven't always been trusty IT experts and transforming from the "break/fix" offerings of their humble beginnings to a fully functional IT outsourcing model hasn't happened overnight.
MSPs have had to become IT experts across all functional areas to keep up with customer expectations, including trials, beta tests, project management, installation, training, monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, and especially customer support.
With this new importance of accommodating IT services, MSPs have begun searching for new platforms to aid with providing their services, as well as monetizing more of their services for both their own and their client's benefits.
Recently, Radisys Corporation, a global leader of open telecom solutions, announced the availability of the Radisys Engage Digital Platform (EDP), an open cloud communication platform that ushers in a new generation of programmable communications services, including conversational AI applications, video-based customer care, hyper-personalized social engagements, and Industry 5.0 applications enabling human-machine collaboration. Service providers can use the platform to quickly and profitably tailor solutions to meet the needs of multiple enterprise and consumer segments.
RadiSys EDP is the first cloud communication platform that combines: low-code / no-code applications and solution building blocks for the fastest time-to-market; a microservices-based architecture that can be distributed across public and private data centers and edge clouds; and a business model that accelerates and maximizes return on network investments.
"Network investments, customer relationships, and communication data insights are valuable assets for communication service providers to devise new digital services," said Al Balasco, Head of Media, Core and Applications Business at Radisys. "Radisys' vision is to apply over 20 years of network and media processing expertise to help our customers exploit those assets to create unique applications that serve their customers' exact requirements and lead to profitable customer and supplier outcomes. Engage Digital Platform unlocks that value to meet the needs of one, one million or 100 million of their customers."
Engage Digital Platform makes service providers' network capabilities, reliability, and analytics accessible to business analysts, IT managers, and application developers. This service enablement approach provides unparalleled application control for innovation, adaptability, and micro-customization. Datacenter-to-edge deployment flexibility enhances data and business process privacy, delivers telco-grade reliability, and reduces latency for optimal performance for applications where milliseconds matter.
With the rapid adoption of broadband networks such as 5G, service providers are positioned to leverage a new programmable communications paradigm to facilitate a transformative wave of innovation in real-time communications, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and edge cloud applications. Additionally, media processing technologies such as conversational AI, computer vision for video analytics, virtual assistants, AR/VR, LTE-M IoT, and more are gaining traction.
Radisys' experience in providing high-performance media processing for nearly 200 wireless operators and thousands of enterprise applications through reseller and independent software vendor partners positions Engage Digital Platform as a leading foundation for these services.
"Service providers are adopting cloud-based programmable communications to deliver new, compelling, and highly-customized services to consumers and businesses," said Alan Quayle, Founder, TADHack and TADHack Summit. "Advancements in real-time speech and video processing/analytics enable service providers to regain revenues being lost to cloud-based competitors. Radisys' easy-to-use platform enables service providers, their partners, and their customers to cost-effectively create new, immersive, and engaging communications experiences."
Radisys is introducing first-of-its-kind capacity-based pricing for programmable voice and video services. Compared to the usage-based models traditionally employed in the market, Radisys' model allows service providers to capture higher profits faster with greater flexibility in how they price, package, and bundle their offers. Additionally, this opens the door to new applications of video calling and speech processing that are cost-prohibitive under the traditional market business model.
Support for high performance and scalable, low latency communications required for the new generation of edge and private network applications. Low-footprint services can be deployed via automation based on the location that is best suited to the performance, security, and cost profile of the application. On top of this, Built-in web-scale and telco-compliance mandates to provide horizontal scale and performance supporting SLAs that public cloud-only services can't match, while white-label platform allows network operators to offer brand-focused messaging.
"The future of commerce is voice, and partnering with Radisys gives us the opportunity to power hundreds of businesses with a cutting-edge AI-driven voice solution that helps them deliver richer and more intuitive customer experiences. The Engage Digital platform is built to handle the rising demand for voice-based digital customer interactions—cost-effectively," said Swapan Rajdev, Co-Founder & CTO at Haptik. "Within our first few calls, we knew that Radisys would be the right partner for us. Team Radisys is incredibly strong in terms of their knowledge about voice-based technology, enabling us to deliver the highest quality of voice-based AI solutions to our customers globally. We were also impressed with their customer support team – Radisys is very prompt and offers best-in-class support whenever needed."
Edited by
Luke Bellos
