The SDP Global Summit has become the must-attend event across all telecom service platforms, not simply service delivery platforms.  Previous Summits from 2012, 2011 Day 1, 2011 Day 2, and 2011 Highlights are reviewed on this weblog and you can see they have predicted the course of the industry.

I’m in particularly excited about the following sessions:

• Jose Valles, Telefonica Digital.  Back in 2011 Jose clearly explained the money is not in the long tail, I reviewed that presentation in this weblog.  Jose will be setting the path for future success of the industry; with APIs being a part of it, but its so much more than simply APIs.
• Arnauld Blonde, VP Marketing, Products, and Innovation, Orange.  Orange have aggressively rolled out a group-wide SDP, as we have seen in Telefonica and America Movil.  It will be interesting to compare and contrast their experiences.
• David Moro, Service Platforms Specialist, Telefonica Group, and Andreas Boose, Senior Systems Architect, Telefonica O2.  Together the brain-trust of Telefonica’s group SDP and UNICA API success will share their experiences.
• Sebastian Grabowski, Service Platforms & Middleware Division Director, Orange Poland.  A polymath doing great things in embedded communications services across many ecosystems.
• Naoki Uchida, Director, NTT Service Innovation Labs.  A case study in how to use APIs internally for service innovation, not just externally.

I show below the post-conference workshop on FRIDAY 20th SEPTEMBER (yes, the day after the main event) I’ll be giving with APIdaze, Telestax, Solaimes, and Tropo.  I see much confusion and miss-information in the market, some pointers I’d like to raise that we’re going to explore in much more depth in the workshop are:

• An API is just a channel for a service, its not The Service.  The API simply lowers the integration and set-up cost of the service, makes the service easy to consume.
• API Management’s communities are NOT the same as API Publisher’s communities.  Tropo lives/dies by its community; API Management vendors do not, their customers generally bring their ecosystem.  This difference is critical for a telco in building its API business.
• Its not mobile application developers telcos need to target, its telecom application developers, as discussed in this weblog.  You need partners that help you target businesses that will engage and spend money; not take your hackathon prize money and move onto the next hackathon.
• Using APIs internally and within your existing ecosystems generate far greater returns than chasing third party innovation, see Telecom Italia and Telefonica for proven examples and reviewed in previous articles.

I hope to see you at the Friday 20th Sept workshop, and let me know if you’re planning to be in Rome on Thursday 19th or Friday 20th evening and we can meet up for dinner.

Independent Review of Telecom APIs.  Post Conference Workshop at SDP Global Summit

We’ve seen in 2013 a flurry of Telecom API activities, from AT&T’s launch of call control and WebRTC APIs in January, the activities in the Philippines and Poland around Telecom APIs, Telefonica and Telenor’s collaboration on APIs.  As well as massive industry consolidation with Aepona and Mashery being bought by Intel Software, Computer Associates buying Layer 7 Technologies, and Programmable Web being bought by Mulesoft.  Then $70M being raised by Twilio.  What is the reality behind the hype, what makes commercial sense, what’s going to happen to the market, what are other industry verticals doing, what should you be doing?

I will provide a frank and independent review of Telecom APIs, to help you understand the reality behind the vendor and analyst hype, the practical realities of Telecom APIs the marketing echo-chamber of the online media never touch upon. This is a critical point, I am not trying to make you buy a platform so the business can be sold making the investors / founders richer and you’re unlikely to ever see again.  I’ve been providing my frank independent advice for the past 10 years (as of November this year) and will be around providing my frank independent advice for at least the next 20 years.  Bear this fact in mind when evaluating data from different sources.  Think. do not believe!

My session will then be followed by detailed and quantified case studies on the application of successfully deploying telecom APIs from Apidaze, Telestax, Solaiemes, and Tropo:

• The customers of Apidaze’s Telecom API include SaaS providers, affiliate marketing networks, media agencies and e-commerce sites.  Apidaze will share their experiences through quantified case studies of how their customers have created new business applications on Telecom APIs to grow revenues, improve customers’ experiences and improve operations.
• Mobicents is trusted by 80% of world’ Tier 1 telecoms and thousands of enterprises.  Telestax will discuss a case study with one of their customers in the health care space, who integrated cutting edge sensor technologies with Restcomm (based on Mobicents) – telco API to create a mission critical system that quite literally saves lives on a daily basis.
• Solaiemes’ joyn RCS API is deployed by several telcos.  It is being used by telcos and enterprises (including banks) to create new self-service interactions based on Instant Messaging. Solaiemes will describe how the APIs exposed from the joyn RCS messaging platform are creating new interaction experiences, and discuss the learning to date from these deployments.
• Tropo API is used by many businesses, e.g. Crunched, Speak2Leads, delivery.com, TeleSmart, they run their business on Tropo.  Tropo will share the secrets of their success, to help Telcos build their telecom API business success.

The workshop provides a frank and independent review of the status of the market including detailed case studies, to help you identify where to place your bets for 2014.  Consolidate your Telecom API learning from the conference into a clear view of what it means to your business with this one day workshop.