Not all UcaaS solutions are created equal

Aren’t all UCaaS solutions the same?

In the evolving field of unified communications, not all solutions are created equal. When it comes to evaluating vendors and vendor partnerships, features and pricing are key parts of your buying decision, along with product-market fit and alignment with your customers in terms of third-party integrations.

But, a key part of that evaluation should also be the technical decisions the vendor has taken about how that solution has been built and deployed, as these will speak to questions around scalability, speed of deployment, and reliability that are just as important.

What’s the difference?

Distinguishing between open source and proprietary solutions reveals pivotal factors for partners looking to adopt a forward-thinking UCaaS vendor. 

Open source, marked by its public and transparent code base, is widely adopted by small to large vendors. Its wide adoption has resulted in it being viewed as a safe choice - used and trusted by many, and fortified by community support over a long period of time. Common examples are Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, and these serve as the building blocks for many solutions in the channel and direct marketplaces.

In contrast, a proprietary code base is entirely owned by the vendor - they built it, from scratch - and that means they control everything within it and the products they build on top of it. So product innovation is entirely within their control and they are beholden to no one.

What are the limitations?

In an open source world, everyone shares the same code base, which means the vendors who walk this path are all working within the same constraints when it comes to feature development. It places all the open source vendors at the same technical level - anything one can do, the other can do - which means every vendor is serving a similar dish to their partners and customers, just on a slightly different looking plate.

This is particularly prevalent with integrations and APIs, where the open source dependent vendor often cannot deliver feature-rich embedded integrations as quickly, easily and securely (if at all), and in many cases middle-ware is needed to ‘stitch’ the solutions together.

With a proprietary solution, that underlying IP ownership means the vendor can constantly evolve the offering to partners and customers with rich (and in the case of CallSwitch One) ‘no code’ integrations, and with an abundant API and webhook library, partners and customers can even develop their own integrations and services however they wish.

Where are the risks?

In an open source world, all vendors share the same inherent risks - a vulnerability that affects one, affects them all. Often the vendors are powerless to patch issues at source, because they didn’t design or own the underlying code base - their solutions are ‘upcycled’ from the same open source code.

In contrast, proprietary solutions are IP 100% owned by the vendor that created them, which means that while (just like any software) vulnerabilities can arise, any such vulnerabilities can be quickly patched, tested, and released because of that owned ecosystem. Also, any such patches won’t cause potential interoperability issues elsewhere down the line.

What about deployment?

When evaluating a vendor, it’s not just about the solution itself and how it’s built, but also how it’s deployed. This is particularly important when it comes to things like scalability and resilience.

Lots of open source UCaaS products are ‘single server’ solutions. As the wording suggests, this means that a customer or group of customers will be deployed on a single server. And while vendors can (and do) implement replication and backup (so called ‘warm spares’), this adds to server footprint, and bringing backups online isn’t always an elegant process - there’s nearly always some form of delay or downtime experienced.

Exactly the same can be said of proprietary solutions, and some are deployed as single server instances. However, CallSwitch One is a proprietary solution that’s deployed a little differently. With CallSwitch One, all users are replicated across all the servers, which are hosted by Google in their highly resilient Cloud Services platform. All user information is, like anything, written to and read from databases, and to do this we use the only true read/write database. All of this combined means that if a server in Google’s cluster goes offline with 1,000 users residing on it, all those users are instantly available again on another server, with resources distributed evenly (what’s known  as ‘load balancing’) to ensure we avoid service degradation.

So why is this important? It’s important because the reason that we can deploy CallSwitch One in such an efficient and effective way is down to how it’s been designed and built from the ground up, using our own code base.

Final thoughts

The dynamic landscape of the UCaaS industry demands a strategic perspective when choosing a solution in an increasingly saturated market full of ‘me too’ solutions. It is important to consider not only features and pricing but also the technical foundation and deployment methods that are most suitable to your business. CallSwitch One offers efficiency in deployment, quick vulnerability patching, and flexible innovation. Making an informed decision about your product becomes crucial for businesses looking to become ‘future-ready’, and educating yourself on the UCaaS solutions available is a fundamental step towards this.

Ready to learn more about our future-ready solutions? Click here to find out how we can help.