TechEdge AI Interview with Dag Peak, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Alianza

Welcome, Dag! How did you develop expertise in cloud communications, and what essential skills prepared you for leading product strategy at companies like Alianza? What significant challenges did you face previously, and how did you overcome them? 

My career in cloud communications began in 1998 at Qwest Communications as VoIP began its emergence as the foundation for all telecommunications services. I built on this experience with roles at New Global Telecom, one of the first true cloud voice providers, and later with many of the dominant leaders in voice and unified communications from BroadSoft to Cisco and RingCentral. My career trajectory has now spanned more than 20 years delivering cloud-based communications solutions – invaluable background for my current role leading product and technology strategy at Alianza.

Through these experiences, one dynamic has remained consistent that communications as an industry is cautious and sometimes resitant to change. There’s simply too much on the line. If a customer picks up the phone and gets no dial tone, that’s catastrophic. I have to consider the need for consistent, familiar and reliable services with the need to innovate. As a result, I often think about how to balance the demands of today with the opportunities of tomorrow. I must encourage customers to embrace new innovations, while also ensuring them about the stability of the services their end users rely on every day.

This tension is healthy and brings up another key part of my job. I have to be an effective storyteller – not often part of tech job descriptions – to help bring customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders along in understanding what the latest innovations may unlock for the business. My ability to be a trusted resource has been critical, continuing to shape the way I connect with others from across the industry to overcome inertia and unlock our joint success.

How do you leverage your experience to drive product innovation and strategy at Alianza? 

My experience spans the evolution of telecom: the Telco 1.0 days of legacy TDM infrastructure and the Telco 2.0 era of deploying SIP-based VoIP platforms, to the Telco 3.0 era of today where we have core communications platforms moving to the cloud. And currently, we find ourselves at the beginning of the Telco 4.0 era, which will be defined by the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to our communications services and systems. I’m of the opinion that AI really will lead to absolutely seismic shifts in our industry.  

At Alianza, our product management philosophy is simple. We are committed to tackling the complexities of core communications services, including voice (business and residential) and unified communications, and enabling service providers with an elegant solution easily consumable for both service providers and their end users. We walk a mile in our customers’ shoes to understand which communications services are going to drive their businesses and ultimately, increase revenue. I constantly think about the value Alianza brings to customers and how we can continue to innovate and expand our impact to their bottom line.

What are the main opportunities and challenges for service providers in cloud communications? What are the Alianza platform's key benefits that root out the challenges? 

Market intelligence firm IDC projects global revenue for telco cloud infrastructure software to grow to $27.3 billion in 2027. The anticipated market growth presents an opportunity for traditional service providers to capture additional revenue, but only if they embrace innovation. Despite possessing robust IP broadband networks, service providers struggle to innovate rapidly enough to keep up with over-the-top communications services, which are often more agile, capturing meaningful revenues that the service providers themselves would rather retain.

To compete, service providers should rethink their business models and move towards the cloudification of their various services. This shift allows them to accelerate the delivery of value-added services, including managed voice, unified communications as a service, contact centers, Wi-Fi, and security.

Alianza is positioned to be the innovation engine for service providers. As workers with Telco 1.0 and 2.0 expertise retire and new candidates with these skills become scarce, Alianza enables service providers to modernize legacy systems, simplify operations, and improve the end-user experience, boosting revenue growth.

How do you incorporate AI and leading-edge technologies into Alianza's product roadmap and next-generation voice solutions? 

Artificial Intelligence is already dramatically impacting both our personal and professional lives. However, many of the primary applications of AI are targeted at large enterprises and knowledge workers. To date, AI hasn’t yet percolated down to mainstream America and the millions of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that account for 99.9 percent of all U.S. companies. 

Alianza will bring Generative AI (GenAI)-powered capabilities to Main Street businesses and enrich their communications in compelling ways – including bringing AI to the phone line. Your local auto parts shop or bookstore will get access to valuable and previously hidden insights, such as what customers are most frequently calling about, emotional content and tone of the conversations, and how well employees are handling them.

How do you manage collaboration between product, design, and engineering teams? What are your best practices? 

As a product and technology leader, I prioritize removing barriers and establishing mutual trust between teams. This empowers individuals to deeply engage with each other and leverage everyone’s core focus areas and expertise, resulting in one effective and high performing team.

Once you establish a shared vision and goals, teams can move quickly to achieve remarkable feats without distractions. Expectations for velocity should be reinforced with constant communication. And when you create positive and collaborative environments like we have at Alianza – where everybody feels they're part of something significant – the risk of burnout goes down, and people are truly motivated. 

How do you measure and optimize the impact of your products on provider revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction? 

Alianza regularly engages with service providers through extremely detailed reviews of their total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) models. Each review is unique, with information about CapEx and OpEx expenditures for equipment and associated employees; the profitability of their services and opportunity costs; and which services are inadequate for the market. We show our prospects and existing partners how these key indicators can improve if they move to Alianza’s cloud communications platform: They can reduce CapEx and potentially OpEx, bring more compelling offers to the marketplace, and focus resources on their true core competencies rather than voice services. 

Service providers find this data compelling and recognize the strategic imperatives of moving to the cloud and a Telco 3.0 model. Over time, we reassess forecasts and fold the data into engagement models to even better optimize our products and services.

Looking ahead to 3-5 years, what prominent innovations and disruptions do you see occurring in cloud communications and collaboration technologies? What emerging trends are you most excited about in voice, video, and business communications to further Alianza’s product portfolio? 

We're at the cusp of the next mega revolution with GenAI, which I believe may have the same level of societal impact as fire, agriculture, and electricity. It’s going to be transformative in everything we do, including communications technology. That’s our focus: How are we going to leverage GenAI to accelerate what we do at Alianza? How will we use it to better write code and monitor our cloud platform?  

Alianza will integrate AI to enrich communications services on our platform, including the telephone calls that SMBs still rely on to conduct business. Alianza is going to democratize AI for Main Street and help service providers rehumanize how we use voice calls. Leveraging our collaboration with Amazon Web Services, the industry’s leading cloud computing provider, Alianza will deliver business and customer insights from fixed-line and mobile calls: call transcripts, summaries, sentiment analysis, data on sales closing rates, and more.