At the IMS World Forum we ran a workshop on IMS and WebRTC, its full title “IMS World Forum Pre-Conference Workshop: A New Wave of Communication Service Innovation: IMS and WebRTC.” The presentations are shown below, the running order kicked off with me frankly reviewing the challenges we face with service innovation, so after I got the audience depressed everyone built them up from there showing the way forward. My core message is we need to take a dual track approach to communications, we can not let the legacy crap stop us innovating in communications. I highlighted the successes of Orange Libon and Telenor’s Appear.in as examples of how to approach communications in an fresh way to remain relevant to customers.
Piers from Metaswitch provided a great review of Project Clearwater, an open source IMS. There were lots of questions from the telcos in the audience (about 75% of the audience) on the scope of functionality covered. Clearwater is a fast moving project, with software updates every 2 weeks. A comment from several telcos was wishing Metaswitch had launched Clearwater several years earlier, but regardless, its an important platform for all operators as they appear to be willing to deploy multiple IMS, so this should be the one for service innovation.
Mark from OpenCloud again showed there is light at the end of the tunnel with a great review of Adaptive Signaling on Rhino to manage service migration from legacy through IMS to WebRTC. Juan from Solaiemes gave another round of impressive live demos showing the power of Rich Communications Services, and how WebRTC can be used today for operators to deliver new services across both consumer and enterprise demos. Solaiemes remains my top platform recommendation for RCS innovation.
Doug from Oracle reviewed their WebRTC gateway in bridging the web and telco worlds. Their real estate demo was impressive, showing how WebRTC based services can today deliver rich communication experiences that simply work. And we wrapped up the day with another excellent presentation from Tropo showing unique innovations in communications only telcos can deliver. Jose’s closing message was ‘Why Not?’ This echo’s a presentation I’ve been giving for several months where I finish on ‘No Excuses.’ We are at a point where the technology is there for amazing service innovation, we just have to do it.
This was a theme throughout the workshop, the importance of service innovation, internally (with operator branded services), with partners, and with independent telecom application developers. In all the presentations we came back to the important role TADHack plays in showing to the developer and telecom communities the simplicity with which communications services can be programmed into applications, services and business processes. TADHack sponsors include Apidaze, hSenid Mobile, Huawei, Nexmo, Oracle, Solaiemes, Telestax, Tropo, Truphone, Ubuntu / Canonical; technology partners Appery.io, Metaswitch and Voxbone; and many many others others seeing the truth of what we’re trying to do and helping.
To all the Telcos and Enterprise CIOs who read my weblog, TADHack is your chance to meet nearly all the innovators in Telecom Services in one place. On 6th June you’ll have an intense day of thought leadership and education. On the 7th June in the morning we’re going to have a networking event for the sponsors and telcos in attendance to meet. You’ll meet through the event the vast diversity of developers you need to be working with, and in the afternoon of the 7th hear impressive innovations. The ideas coming in from developers are amazing, I’m proud to be associated with this event. For anyone involved in communication service innovation TADHack is the event you would be foolish to miss, seriously, sign up here its a bargain and well worth the investment of 2 days of your time.