Saving Private CloudTelephony: Industry unites
“Hey is this Ambarish speaking?” — I got the call. Yes, I said. It was an unknown number. “How are things going with regulatory currently?”. I was a little puzzled. “I am sorry, do I know you?”. “Ah.. I am sorry. I should have introduced. I am X running a Cloud Telephony company”.
I have spoken with more of my competitors in last 7 days than all of the last 7 years combined. Many of my fierce competitors called me and extended all possible help they could offer. This was a very different side of the people I had known as competitor companies.
There was an acknowledgement of the shared passion, the professionalism and the pain that Cloud Telephony companies go through. Some of the players chose to quietly fight through the problems when things hit them. As they
saw us trying to solve these problems, they felt our pain and generously extended their support. They tweeted for us showing their support. We also received support from industry veterans such as Sharad Sharma who helped us draft a policy level document as input to TRAI consultation paper.
For our customers, the phone number is important. The show had to go on. We were looking to go to the court to get our disconnected lines re-connected on Monday but we discovered that TDSAT had gone on vacation. While we have been fighting through the court delays, we worked tirelessly to find a work-around. It costs us a lot more but we had been able to divert the call traffic from Delhi to other data centers and other telecom operators. This allowed us to bring back the numbers disconnected because of the sudden and unexpected outage last week. We intend to get our disconnected capacity in Delhi back as soon as possible so that our call processing capacity comes back to normal.
Most of our customers are back to business now. We had some hiccups. As soon as we started serving the call volume though our other data centers, we ran into congestion problems. We solved that by adding more servers and capacity.
We were very vulnerable during this time. However, I was amazed by the empathy and support we received from our customers. Their lines were down and they were hurting. But they chose to back us up. Mr. Homecare wrote a blog and it summarizes the kind of response we had from them. We always knew that honesty was the best policy. We got an amazing dividend out of this policy.
“But could this happen again?” — the lines are back but people wonder. It is a fair question. While nothing is certain in this world, we are making sure that such sudden actions by individuals officials do not bring our or any other Cloud Telephony company’s business down in future. We needed an industry advocacy group that can take the conversations to the corridors of the regulators. We are doing this. This makes sure that we are a known Industry and any decisions made on the industry goes through a due consultation process with the industry players. With a united industry, we can make sure we have much better responses to any such activity against any of the Cloud Telephony player in the future.
We also are making sure our response time to something like this is better. We had to do so many manual activities to re-route the calls to other data center. We are looking to automate those activities. We are making sure we do not give landline numbers to customers for whom change in the number is painful. Those people should use a mobile number or a toll-free number. The discipline around this will make sure that in case of such disconnections, people can get a new number and life can go on without any problems.
You know that investors love you when something this tragic happen and your board member want to come pay for your beer. Mohit Bhatnagar from Sequoia Capital visited the office today and took the team down for some beer and the war stories of his own at Airtel. Rome was not build overnight. And I bet it was not built without fight either.
