Charlotte, N.C. and Pleasant Grove, Utah — May 24, 2023 — Alianza, Inc., the communications cloud for service providers, and Brightspeed, the nation’s fifth-largest incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC), today announced their joint effort to deliver innovative voice and unified communications (UC) services to residential and small business customers across the Brightspeed next-generation fiber broadband network. Alianza is a part of Brightspeed’s broader transformation effort to bring faster and more reliable internet service and cloud communications to more than 3 million homes and businesses over the next few years, primarily targeting locations where fiber and advanced technology have not historically been deployed. 

Supported by a roster of blue-chip technology vendor partners, Brightspeed is implementing a unique network architecture designed to dramatically simplify operations, accelerate deployment, and extend market availability. With Alianza, Brightspeed will offer innovative communications services such as unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and traditional voice services such as home phone, business lines, and plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) replacement for specialty lines. Brightspeed will serve residential and small businesses with the Alianza product suite, all under the Brightspeed brand.  

“We continue to make intentional decisions to deploy leading-edge, best-in-class cloud native technologies as we build out our fiber network, so our customers have access to state-of-the-art services backed by unmatched customer service,” said Joe Ambeault, vice president of product management for Brightspeed. “Alianza’s platform and its supportive customer success and enablement team are an important component of that strategy, giving us the ability to quickly deliver the new voice and UC services our customers want through our robust broadband offering.”

By selecting Alianza’s cloud communications platform, Brightspeed realizes numerous benefits: 

• Speed to market: Alianza’s scalable, flexible cloud-native platform enables Brightspeed to quickly bring the most in-demand communications services to market, and easily keep up with market changes and service innovations over time. 
• Simplified operations through API-driven automation: The ability to integrate its business and operations support (BSS/OSS) systems to Alianza’s API-first cloud platform automates the end user buy-flow, account provisioning, billing, and end-to-end workflows.   
• Enhanced customer experience: By eliminating the need to manage traditional voice equipment, feature server upgrades, and other legacy voice network complexities, Alianza’s solution frees up Brightspeed’s operations teams to focus on providing an exceptional end user experience.  
• Carrier-grade reliability and security: Constant security benchmarking and automated failover to georedundant, always-on data centers, delivers a dependable service. 
• Compelling business case: Alianza’s commercial model enables Brightspeed to eliminate capital requirements for voice networking and assures the lowest total operating cost as the customer base scales.  

“Brightspeed’s focus on building a modern, agile, next-generation broadband company with continued innovation and a commitment to delivering top-notch customer experiences is a perfect match with our company culture and history,” said Brian Beutler, founder and CEO of Alianza. “We are working together to connect people in new and innovative ways and help Brightspeed execute on bridging the digital divide in their communities.”

About Alianza  

Alianza is the communications cloud for service providers. We help our customers supercharge growth, reduce costs, and transform into modern techcos. With Alianza, service providers can navigate the end of the softswitch era and upgrade to a cloud-native solution to power both legacy voice and next-gen cloud communications services — including cloud meetings, collaboration, and text messaging. Our team of experts are passionate about simplifying service delivery and ensuring first-rate customer experiences for more than 200 service providers. Learn more about our solutions at www.alianza.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Brightspeed 

Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C. and with assets and associated operations in 20 states, Brightspeed provides broadband and telecommunications services through a network platform capable of serving more than 6.5 million homes and businesses. Brightspeed’s vision is to promote a world where people and businesses have access to the connectivity they need to accomplish what is important. Our more than 4,000 employees are committed to bridging the digital divide by deploying a state-of-the-art fiber network and a customer experience that makes staying connected simple and seamless. For more information, visit www.Brightspeed.com.

Pleasant Grove, Utah – April 12, 2023 – Alianza, Inc. today introduced Alianza for Microsoft Teams, a new and powerful solution that gives service providers a robust cloud PBX voice solution for Microsoft Teams.  

Many communication service providers (CSPs) struggle with the complexities and hidden costs of setting up telephony for Microsoft Teams via Direct Routing or Operator Connect. In many cases, they are forced to employ a third-party Microsoft partner to manage a Teams integration on their behalf. Alianza for Microsoft Teams ensures successful implementation by automating the voice configuration between the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant and the Alianza platform — without specialized expertise or expensive network elements like session border controllers (SBCs).  

With Alianza for Microsoft Teams, both CSPs and Teams administrators bypass the heavy lift and complex configuration of the voice calling and user policies in the Microsoft Teams admin center. 

Highlights of Alianza for Microsoft Teams include:  

• Unprecedented Automation: A two-step deployment to add licenses and sync, it’s that simple. Alianza has simplified Direct Routing for PSTN and PBX provisioning, which eliminates the heavy technical lift for CSPs. 
• Robust PBX Feature Set: Comprehensive calling features support knowledge workers who live and breathe Teams, while continuing to support non-Teams users within the organization who are primarily reliant on traditional telephony functionality and devices. 

• Superior PSTN Coverage: Wide rate renter coverage ensures CSPs can provide telephone numbers wherever their Teams users are located. 
• Extensive CPE Interoperability: Alianza for Microsoft Teams supports a broad variety of SIP endpoints ranging from IP phones to high density analog gateways, including devices from Cisco, Yealink, and Poly, empowering CSPs with the ability to deploy the right devices for their customers. 
• Faster Time to Market: Alianza for Microsoft Teams can be enabled and set up in minutes so CSPs can take advantage of the Teams opportunity immediately as opposed to the typical 12-month deployment timeframe. 
• Administrative Ease: With Alianza for Microsoft Teams automation, CSPs don’t need to define the SBC and PBX templates every time they sign up or move an end user to the Teams integration. In addition, PowerShell scripting is not required to build, test, and deploy, meaning zero extra work for the Teams Admin. 
• Security: End-to-end encryption of both signaling and media is enforced between the integration and Microsoft 365. Additionally, administrative access is controlled by Azure/Microsoft 365 single sign-on; no user credentials are stored by the portal. 

With 280 million Teams monthly active users globally, only 30% of which are active Teams Phone users and a much smaller percentage with PSTN, there is a massive market opportunity for CSPs to build their “with Teams” strategy and capitalize on the large and growing Microsoft’s Team ecosystems.

Although Microsoft offers documentation to enable Direct Routing, it’s an intense, do-it-yourself approach that requires high levels of specialized expertise. Alianza’s turnkey, voice-enabled Teams integration goes beyond Direct Routing to radically simplify the heavy technical and administrative complexities of implementing Direct Routing. With Alianza for Microsoft Teams, CSPs are better positioned to deliver an enterprise-grade, feature-rich, and administratively easy solution to their end–users. 

Alianza’s Business Cloud Communications PBX serves as the central calling platform and routing engine for Microsoft Teams users, offering consistent call routing policies and proper management of user presence, metrics, and call routing. Simply add the integration to an account through the Alianza Admin Portal and identify the Microsoft 365 Global Admin user who will manage the integration. CSP staff and the Global Admin will have a real-time status view of the state and health of the integration in the Alianza portal. 

“We’ve eliminated all of the complexity required by service providers to deliver Teams telephony for their end-users. Alianza for Microsoft Teams is another example of how Alianza innovates to help CSPs grow their cloud communications portfolio, capitalize on large revenue opportunities, and radically simplify voice and UC deployment at scale,” says Dag Peak, Chief Product Officer at Alianza. “This represents a massive market opportunity. Service providers can leverage Microsoft Teams’ popularity, market share, and extensive customer base by using Alianza for Microsoft Teams as the ideal, voice integration solution.”  

Availability 

Alianza for Microsoft Teams is available now in the US and Canada. For more information, visit https://www.alianza.com/products/uc-applications/ or get in touch. 

About Alianza

Alianza is the communications cloud for service providers. We help our customers supercharge growth, reduce costs, and transform into modern techcos. With Alianza, service providers can navigate the end of the softswitch era and upgrade to a cloud-native solution to power both legacy voice and next-gen cloud communications services — including cloud meetings, collaboration, and text messaging. Our team of experts are passionate about simplifying service delivery and ensuring first-rate customer experiences for more than 200 service providers. Learn more about our solutions at www.alianza.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.