“We were able to quickly integrate a whole host of traditional, foundational telecom functions into the Microsoft platform and then quickly ‘lift and shift’ it for any customer,” Frank added. “It also allowed us to expand our functionality by leveraging Microsoft prebuilt technologies such as security, but also things such as native mobile app integration." Frank went on to explain that a typical deployment can take as little as weeks, and being able to leverage the power of the mobile app integration gives customers access to new features to better streamline operational processes out of the box. For example, it gives them access to the phone’s camera for OCR, data input, and even QR or barcodes. Imagine you can be on a tour with a customer, take a picture of a business card, automatically add it as a lead in CRM, open an opportunity and start adding available products in real-time, and send them the order by the time you leave. This is something Carma calls ‘shortening the data distance.’

“It’s ridiculous to think it takes days or weeks to interact with customers, when it can all be centralized and automated into one place,” Frank commented.

So—why did Carma do it? In short, with extensive telecom and Silicon Valley technology experience, the brothers McDermott know that to realize the full potential of future use cases, service providers must have better visibility, seamless automation, and an intuitive toolkit that can be used across an entire organization. Even more, they have felt the industry’s pain to meet the demands for ever-greater connectivity in exploding complexity; they’ve seen firsthand how technical problems become obstacles to innovation.

“The geek problem becomes an operational problem, which becomes a sales problem, which becomes a ‘survival of the company’ problem,” Joe explained.

Frank expanded on this, explaining how telecoms are encumbered by legacy Y2K-era tools and systems. He has seen this throughout his career, including as an industry consultant before founding Carma.

“At heart, we’re network engineers. We saw how much manual work was done to move data and join data and asked ourselves, ‘Why are Notepad and Excel mission-critical applications?’ Why are TIRKS or Metasolv still around when they needed a bullet 10 years ago?’”

Carma brings Microsoft’s entire cloud and applications platforms, tailored for telecommunications, to drive better asset management, superior customer experience and increased profitability. Simply put, it has achieved a way for service providers to do business better.

Joe added, “Coming from Silicon Valley, it was amazing to me to see people running these massive, complex, profitable and expensive networks with tools that were built in the late 1990s. It’s not that people in telecom were intentionally trying to make things more difficult. They just didn’t have the tools to make business easier, until now.”

Carma has accomplished this by building a wealth of knowledge and culture of innovation that permeates the entire organization, starting at the top and working down to every member of their on-shore development team. The team knows—and understands at a visceral level—the specific and unique demands of the telecom market.

Burying the infrastructure

B/OSS is like roads, or plumbing. Nobody gets excited about them, but we certainly need them. Furthermore, lack of integration and automation is an obstacle to innovation. Traditional B/OSS’s lack of integration has meant that it takes hundreds of clicks to perform simple functions, manage inventory, or access data. Carma is on a mission to kill the clicks and consolidate apps to make innovation easier.

“We’re focusing on ensuring that humans are in the loop, that they can see information as fast as they can think about it,” Frank explained.

To enable this, Carma has taken an underlying rich set of B/OSS functionalities into Microsoft enterprise software that everyone is already using. Although you can, you don’t have to use Carma. Instead, you use the Microsoft product you use daily with