The TADSummit 2018 Agenda is available for download without any email capture, its freely available. We still have a few more presentations and sponsors to add. TADSummit is unique, independent, no BS, and packed; the thought-leadership event in programmable telecoms. We review highlights from the agenda in this weblog.

Thanks to Altice Labs, ENTER, Apidaze, Cequens, TeleSign, tyntec, VoIP Innovations, and Wazo, for sponsoring TADSummit 2018! And all the presenters giving their time and expertise to make TADSummit the thought-leadership event in telecoms.

If you’ve not already done so please register for the event, its only $50. We make the nominal charge to ensure people who sign up to attend do turn up, so we do not waste food. We also stream the event live and record all sessions, you can also register for online / remote attendance, which is free.

Who should attend?

If you’re an enterprise CIO/CTO trying to cut through the UCaaS/CCaaS/CPaaS acronym soup, or trying to separate hype from reality in the latest customer interaction solutions TADSummit will deliver for you.

If you’re a telco working on innovation, enterprise services, APIs and enablers, strategy; no other event comes close on insight and thought-leadership.

If your a web developer or start-up working in the API or Web3 space, TADSummit will provide invaluable insights and connections to help you build your business.

If you’re working in programmable telecoms, CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, customer interaction, instant authentication, web3, or enterprise telecoms. TADSummit will deliver thought-leadership, connections, and leading indicators for building your future success.

The diversity and independence of the people involved ensures this isn’t a “singing to the choir event” where “everything is awesome”. You’ll not see big brands sponsoring TADSummit, you see the brands who are creating our future today.

Some of the highlights from the agenda include:

Keynotes:

• The Evolution of CPaaS from Stacy Stubblefield, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at TeleSign;
• Hybrid Authentication in Decentralized Banking from Marco Lafrentz, Director of CPaaS Business Line, tyntec;
• What can you do with Wazo, from Sylvain Boily, Founder and CTO;
• Cequens Keynote: Road to CPaaS enablement in the MEA Region from Karim Zaki, VP Products;
• VoIP Innovations Keynote: One year older, one year wiser, the Rapid Evolution of CPaaS from David Walsh, CEO VoIP Innovations.

CPaaS Evolution:

• Ottspott Connect – The UI-fication of CPaaS from Luis Borges Quina, CEO ottspott;
• The rise of CPaaS / UCaaS as a Channel to Market for New Services from Karel Bourgois, Founder and CEO Voxist;
• Enterprise Grade Programmable Fax from Howard Avner, Founder Phaxio. Now Director of API Product at Voyant.

We wrap up this CPaaS Evolution session with a panel discussion including:

• Stacy Stubblefield, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at TeleSign
• Marco Lafrentz, Director of CPaaS Business Line, tyntec
• Karim Zaki, VP Products, Cequens
• Luis Borges Quina, CEO ottspott
• David Walsh, CEO VoIP Innovations

Programmable Telecoms in the Enterprise:

• Critical Communications in Private Enterprise Networks from Patrice Crutel, Engagement Director, Communications, Capgemini;
• The Emerging Dichotomy, Centralized versus Decentralized Communications. What is Means to Your Business from Rob Pickering, CEO ipcortex, TADHack London Leader;
• Experiences in Building a European Cloud PBX Business from Dennis Kersten, Business Development, vio:networks;
• Case Study in Building an Integrated IT and Telecom Solution Provider from Andrei Ivanoiu, Managing Partner at Inovo Solutions;
• Embrace the Telecom API Movement from Justin Haefner, Sr. Prin. IT Architect – Collaborative Technologies, Medtronic.

Programmable Telecoms in Customer Interactions:

• New Platforms for Customer Service Communications: Who Benefits? from Shai Berger, CEO and Founder Fonolo;
• Machine Learning in Telecoms from Thomas Quintana, Director of Product R&D at Voyant
• Will Conversational Interfaces Eat Telecoms? from Paul Sweeney, EVP Product at Webio – The Conversational Middleware Company;
• Simply adding SMS to your CRM won’t solve your customer interaction problems.  from Thomas Howe, CTO at TEN DIGIT Communications;
• We wrap up this session with a panel discussion on Voice or Text Chatbots?

Innovation Showcase

• Everything Computes, Everywhere! from Chris Matthieu, CEO at Computes;
• Innovations in the Insurance Industry and Beyond: Programmable Telecoms, IoT, Simply Making the World Better, from Philippe Vayssac, CIO, Groupama;
• Giving a CFO new glasses : Translating traffic flows to profitability flow in high volume and complex networks, from Carl Gandeborn (CEO), NewINSIKT;
• We plan to add a couple more pitches here.

And back by popular demand we wrap up Day One of TADSummit with an evening workshop on Case Studies in Design Thinking & Effectuation from Philippe Vayssac, CIO, Groupama.

Day 2 starts with an important session on Web3:

• Matrix, The Year To Date, from Ben Parsons, Developer Advocate, Matrix;
• Protocol Labs from David Dias, P2P Software Engineer at Protocol Labs. Making IPFS and filecoin;
• Blockchain Hype & Realities form Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis;
• reThink Smart Cities from Paul Chainho, R&D Manager at Altice Labs;
• Panel discussion on Ethereum and the Decentralized Web.

Programmable Telecoms for Telcos:

• Programmable Telecoms is HARD! Working on the toughest transformation in Telecoms from Sebastian Schumann Vice President Engineering at immmr;
• Long live the Telco Hacker! Why MTN is choosing to engage the development community through initiatives like TADHack from Yusuf Kaka, General Manager: Digital Innovation at MTN;
• Evolution of the Telco Services Plane from Greg Sikora, Business Development OVOO;
• Simfony: Building a Global IoT Solution Provider using Programmable Telecoms from Stefan Anghel, Product Architect, Simfony Mobile;
• From Lego to Plasticine. Molding a platform for product development from Werner Eriksen, CTO at WorkingGroupTwo;
• Practical Experiences of Multi-Operator Neutral Hosting from James Body, CEO, Telet Research;
• Conversational Interfaces: leveraging Alexa and Google Assistant when interacting with Telco Product and Services from
  Piyush Gaur and Omer Shaaeldin, Telus.
• Programmable Telecoms in Telia: Go-to-market is Key from Janne Timonen, Senior Business Manager, Telia;
• We’ll wrap up this session, which is divided into 2 parts across lunch with a panel discussion; Challenges and Opportunities in the Cloud Core.

The final session titled State of the Union: ConvTech, From Communications to Conversations is a mix of presentations, panel, and conference-wide discussion on how to make our category as popular and relevant as FinTech.

Discussion on State of the Union Session

Programmable telecoms has created new markets with $100B+ in annual revenues. While significantly lowering service costs, improving the operations of many businesses, and simply making life better for most people in the world. This value creation was not possible within legacy ecosystems, rather without.

The term FinTech, once called Digital Banking (and Finance and Insurance), has gripped the broader business community. While we continue to sing to the choir in Programmable Telecoms. We must find a compelling rallying cry, as what we’re doing is important and changing the world.

We are a diverse group of people from around the world redefining telecoms using modern technologies (APIs, open source, web3, webRTC, cloud) for new and old service providers, and the end consumers/enterprises.

Terms like CPaaS, Cloud Communications, Programmable Telecoms, UCaaS, WebRTC, CCaaS, telecom APIs, while meaningful inside the industry, have not inspired the broader business community (VCs, start-ups, investors, press).

We’re proposing using a simple term: ConvTech, short for Conversation Technology. Recognizing the move from communications to conversations between people and things. A conversation is an exchange of information between two parties (humans or machines).

ConvTech covers CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, open source telecom software, CPaaS enablers, multi-factor authentication, instant authentication, telecom APIs, WebRTC, cloud communications, CPaaS enabled services, omnichannel, telecom infrastructure as code, dashboards, myriad of UIs making APIs and enablers useable beyond coders, etc.  ConvTech is causing the disruption of the $250B enterprise telecoms market, moving it mostly to the cloud and internet.

We’re going to review the landscape, market sizes, and state of play across this broad and relatively unrecognized category and some of the adjacent categories that for simplicity we group under the category of ConvTech.

I’ll wrap up the event with a quick preview of what we have planned for 2019, for example TADHack-mini Orlando 2019 has already been announced.TADSummit 2018 enables you to meet the brain-trust of programmable telecoms for two intense days of insights and revelations. It will be well worth your time to help grow your business.