Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:05):
So Brian, you stated that we're at a critical junction in the roughly 150-year history of telecommunications and that CSPs have the opportunity to turn disruption into opportunity. Can you elaborate on that?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (00:21):
Yeah, totally. I do think it's a really interesting time because we have celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first phone call. So it's a great time to kind of take stock, look back at where this industry has come, where we're going. And I think that's compounded by the fact that we're right in the middle of a transformation. And I think when we look back at the last 150 years of telecom history, this industry has been primarily focused on connecting people for so much of that history. And we did a great job of that. We took phone connectivity into every home, across oceans and into every pocket. And then 20 years ago, unified communications became a thing. And this industry, instead of just connecting people, we started connecting applications and we started communicating in different ways. And now we have video conferences and web meetings and human connectivity and how we communicate is changing.

(01:09):
And now here we sit in 2026 on the cusp of what we believe is the next big revolution in how we communicate because artificial intelligence and the telecommunications networks are on this collision course. And these two worlds are coming together in ways that will change fundamentally how we communicate in profound ways.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (01:31):
So Alianza Crux is a significant investment and it represents a clear bet that operators are going to remain central to communications in the cognitive communications era. Walk us through the thinking behind that bet.

Brian Beutler, Alianza (01:44):
Yeah. So there's a couple of core fundamental theses behind what we've built with Crux. One is that service providers have inherent strategic assets that are now competitive advantages for them. We think about things like customer relationships, incumbency advantage, reach, real commercial relationships with customers that are trusted. They understand regulatory environments and frameworks that they live in. And so that's kind of premise number one. Premise number two is that service providers today are delivering what we call generic horizontal voice services, the same kind of, let's call it three, four, five, maybe six or eight products, and they deliver those same products to millions of end-users or businesses. The change that we're about to go through is that those horizontal products are going to be threatened by vertical market-focused intelligent communications applications where voice is a feature of a business operating solution, not a standalone service. That disruption powered by AI, accelerated by the AI ecosystem behind it is both a threat and a massive opportunity for service providers at the same time.

(02:53):
A threat because if they stand by and participate, they will watch value leave their networks. That's scary. But the truth behind it is all these new intelligent application builders want access to the conversation, are demanding access to something only the service providers can provide. And I don't think that's a threat. I think that's demand beating on the door of this industry saying, give us access to these conversations, help us find an easy path to get access to these conversations and we will share in the value that gets created on those networks. That's an amazing opportunity for service providers.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:28):
You've mentioned that in this new era of AI-powered voice, intelligence will either flow around the network or reside in it. What does that mean and what are the advantages of bringing intelligence inside the network?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (03:42):
Yeah, look, water has a way of following the path of least resistance, gravity. And these experience providers, there's so much value pent up, locked up inside of these conversations. They are like the water headed downstream. Gravity is pulling them. They will find ways to get access to these conversations. What we've heard from these experience providers, it's hard, it's cumbersome. They're forwarding phone numbers outside of the network, creating security vulnerabilities. They're bridging in three-way calls or they're forcing the enterprise to choose a very specific one intelligent experience and saying, I'm now going to forward all my calls to just this one. What Crux enables is the telecom network to remain central to the intelligent experience. Crux is what bridges the gap between the intelligent experience providers and the telecom networks.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (04:33):
So where do you hope to be in 12 months in terms of customers and adoption and how are you going to measure success?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (04:41):
Yeah, it's a great question. I think right now how we're looking at success is we have to build both sides of this ecosystem at once. We have to find critical mass of both operators that are willing to integrate and interoperate their networks with Crux as well as experience providers that are going to drive demand on the other side of the ecosystem. So we are fundamentally building demand and integration on both sides of this ecosystem at once.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:05):
A lot of people assume that CSPs are all over AI, but what are you hearing from your customers?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (05:12):
I think service providers are going through a moment of deep soul-searching on how they think about AI. And I think phase one, the easy low-hanging fruit was how can we use AI to be more operationally efficient internally? And I think they've kind of built those roadmaps. They understand what AI looks like on OSS, on BSS, on billing and taxation and provisioning and all these back-office systems that support their network. And they have now roadmaps to become more efficient and drive additional costs out of the network. And we see their attention now changing to, well, how can we apply those same AI benefits to the products that we sell in market, how we enable our customers, the experiences we enable, how we make our platforms more extensible in a world where the value doesn't reside purely in the network but might get created outside of it, but it's that connectivity between the two that really enable innovation to take place at pace.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (06:07):
While much of the Alianza Crux narrative is around providing orchestration and access, AI voice capabilities are being integrated into the network from a lot of different sources. What makes Alianza a superior alternative to these other approaches?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (06:24):
Yeah, I think in a moment in time like the one we are facing right now, it is impossible to select which applications will be successful and which ones will not. Crux ultimately creates a platform where innovation and the best ideas and the best experiences naturally have a chance to rise to the surface. We just had an operator that went through an exercise trying to evaluate which of all the AI applications they wanted to integrate with and deliver on their network. So they went out and looked at the market, hundreds of different AI developers that would love to integrate with this service provider. Service provider came back and said, look, we've narrowed it down to these 25 we think are really interesting for us. Could you help? And this wasn't us, this is with another industry kind of consultant. They came back and said, look, we think we can help you narrow it down from these 25 to the three most likely ones to be successful.

B(07:18):
But now you're rolling the dice and you're taking a bet as a service provider on which applications are going to be successful. What Crux offers is to de-risk that entire business proposition and it doesn't matter which applications are successful. The service providers will benefit.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:36):
So Brian, you've positioned Alianza Crux as an open-platform, two-sided ecosystem. What exactly does that mean?

Brian Beutler, Alianza (07:45):
Yeah, I think if we really want to understand what this means, where Crux is positioned, we have to look at other examples from the market where big problems have existed and then solutions have come to market to solve those. Crux was designed to bridge the telecom intelligence gap, this gap that exists between the telecom networks we all built yesterday and the intelligent applications we'll all use tomorrow. Problems that big, gaps that big, history has shown us get solved by open platforms and a two-sided ecosystem. And what we mean by an open platform is a platform that does not pick the winners and losers, a platform that allows any service provider to integrate their network to and allows any experience provider, provided that they pass security and kind of privacy and consent thresholds that we have, can now join the ecosystem on the other side. And then the two sides of that ecosystem now are interoperating in a way that the service providers benefit no matter which application wins.

(08:42):
And it allows ease of integration and speed to market because a service provider now has to do one integration instead of integrating specifically with every application that they might want to deploy over their network. They have one, speed, cost, agility are all benefits of this. And then for experience providers, instead of trying to find routes to market, they can integrate once to that same open platform and deploy and get access to conversations with every service provider that is integrated on the other side of the ecosystem. It's a powerful model that bridges big technology gaps.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (09:17):
Well, Brian, thank you.

Brian Beutler, Alianza (09:18):
Thank you for having me. Great conversation.