The purpose of this CXTech Week 12 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
Examples of what falls into CXTech includes: Programable Telecoms / Communications, CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, open source telecom software, CPaaS enablers, Multi-Factor Authentication / Instant Authentication, Telecom APIs, WebRTC, Cloud Communications, CPaaS enabled services, omni-channel, telecom infrastructure as code, telecom service dashboards, the myriad of UIs making APIs and enablers and services useable beyond coders.
You can read more about why we’re testing out this definition in the following weblogs: TADSummit State of the Union, What’s in a Name Part 1 and Part 2discussions.
I wrap up the newsletter with a section covering, “People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff.”
You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list, I also publish this on my weblog. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.
TADHack-mini Orlando 2019, just before Enterprise Connect 2019
TADHack-mini Orlando 2019, held at Valencia College’s Collaborative Design Center, was an impressive CXTech-focused hackathon. Thank you to Flowroute, Telesign, and VoIP Innovations for making TADHack Orlando 2019 possible. And a big thank you to all the teams in Orlando, Austin and Belgium who took part.
On Monday at Enterprise Connect 2019 some of the TADHack-mini Orlando 2019 winners presented their hacks to the EC19 attendees. Here is a summary of TADHack-mini Orlando. We received great feedback from the audience on how impressed they are in what can be achieved in just 24 hours. Orlando should be proud!
I paraphrased a Sir Isaac Newton quote, when highlighting the hacks show the power of programmable telecoms / communications as the teams can “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Mashing up programmable telecoms with many other services available over the web. The hacks created show how CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS platforms can solve problems across all aspects of people’s lives, not just in business.
Why have a hackathon just before Enterprise Connect? There is nothing better than practical experience to learn the power of programmable telecoms / communications.
TADHack-mini Orlando helps showcase the sponsors to the EC19 audience: Flowroute, Telesign and VoIP Innovations. It’s an excellent recruitment tool, not only for employees and contractors, but also for apps into for example VoIP Innovations Showroom. It brings new blood into the industry, which is sorely needed. I do not feel old attending Enterprise Connect, which is saying something these days! And most of all it keeps the sponsors’ honest. There is nothing as insightful (or as hard) as working with a diverse group of developers using your APIs, SDKs, and documentation. They are brutal – its great 🙂
I know some vendors shy away from TADHack, preferred slideware to reality. Others think TADHack is purely about developer acquisition, ignoring education, recruitment, promotion across EC19, and contributing to the growth of the industry. It’s a shame so few CXTech providers’ marketing groups understand the value of TADHack. To the CEO’s of CXTech companies, if you and your product management and your technology teams see the value of what we do at TADHack – find a way to support us! Thankfully Flowroute, Telesign and VoIP Innovations understand and support us.
hSenid Mobile Sponsors TADSummit Asia, 28-29 May, Kuala Lumpur
We’re proud to announce hSenid Mobile are sponsoring TADSummit Asia 2019, 28-29 May in Kuala Lumpur. TADSummit began in 2013 in Bangkok, helping promote telecom APIs, which became known as CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service). Nearly half the sponsors of the first TADSummit have been acquired. TADSummit is the CXTech event, and is where the thought-leaders and market makers meet when it’s still early enough to see 10X ROI.
hSenid Mobile is a company with a proud history of 20 years of innovations, proven expertise while still having the heart of a startup. Their solutions are used by leading Telecoms, Banking & Financial institutions and Enterprises around the world. Those revolutionary solutions bring a high level of flexibility and continuous revenue growth for their customers enabling an Eco-system of creators around them.
Check out TADSummit Asia here.
Enterprise Connect 2019 Innovation Showcase: Actionable Analytics
One of the first sessions at EC19, 9AM on Monday, was the Innovation Showcase: Actionable Analytics. I was one of the judges, thanks to Dave Michel’s invite. It was a great way to kick off EC19 with an interesting variety of presentations.
- Discourse.ai: The Disourse.ai Cognition platform unlocks the value of enterprise customer conversation data using artificial intelligence (AI) and semi-supervised machine learning technologies that harvest data insights from customer interactions. Discourse reviews customer conversations in order to improve chatbot effectiveness. With Cognition, companies can build better bots up to 50% faster.
- Gong.io: The Gong.io platform provides insights into sales conversations, aimed at helping sales teams convert conversations into sales by recording and analyzing conversations. Also useful for training and coaching purposes, Gong allows organizations to stop guessing what works and start measuring.
- Prodoscore: Prodoscore aggregates and scores data from email, CRM, and telephony. The simple score identifies effective communications traits and problem behaviors in order to increase employee productivity and revenue.
- QOS Networks: QOS Networks combines separate network services into a single “edge as a service” offering that encompasses software-defined WAN, security integrations, network configurations, management and monitoring, ITSM integrations, cloud connect, application support and performance monitoring, and more.
- Rammer.ai: Rammer is an AI-powered online communication tool that unifies language insights across multiple channels and conversations. It provides live actionable insights that can impact the outcomes of interactions in real time.
- TechSee: TechSee’s visual engagement platform uses modern AI technologies for visual guidance. It’s more than video conferencing and supports augmented services in assisted service and self-service modes. TechSee’s platform can be used in sales and service contact centers across multiple channels.
Mio won the Best Innovation for Collaboration at Enterprise Connect
Frank Geck, previously Cisco and before that Tropo, recently moved to Mio. Mio enables interoperability between Microsoft Teams, Slack and Webex Teams. It’s a bit like Matrix.org, while Matrix solves the general case through an open source project. Mio is focused on a specific closed-source implementation. So Mio’s win is also a nice endorsement of what Matrix is doing as well.
While the incumbents (Microsoft and Cisco) try to consolidate their positions, and squeeze out competition. Enterprises are behaving differently today. Diversity reigns! I’m a user of all three platforms, and several more besides. Incumbents struggle to offer what highly focused enterprise messaging innovators do. If we were discussing Mio in China, the focus would be around WeChat interop rather than Slack. In Japan, LINE and Slack. Diversity is on the rise.
Enterprise Connect 2019 Stuff
Dave Michels will sum up most of the announcements nicely on TalkingPointz.
Several new cloud contact centers were announced Edify, Thrio, and Vonage’s CX Cloud Express (based on NVM ).
AI was the fashion, so all the big vendors were wearing the latest AI:
“Avaya Deepens Integration with Google Cloud to Provide Powerful AI Enhancing Customer Experience”
“8×8 Unlocks Business Insights From Every Conversation With AI-Based Speech Analytics”
“Genesys to Showcase Customer Success Using Cloud, AI and Digital Channels”
“Cisco enhances Webex Assistant with AI meeting, call controls.”
Shai Berger of Fonolo has an excellent take on AI at EC19. For me, it’s just the latest fashionable thinking everyone considers essential to wear. Generally I’d recommend focusing on experimenting with those in the Innovator Showcase at the moment to deliver results.
VoIP Innovations had their Showroom on show at EC19.
AT&T announced is API marketplace and turnkey applications (this is the more important aspect), powered by Ribbon’s Kandy platform. BTW we had a hack from an AT&T solution architect at TADHack-mini Orlando.
Telesign, Flowroute, Voyant, VoxImplant, and many more CPaaS providers had big stands at the show. EC19 is starting to feel like a family reunion these days.
Polycom/Plantronics rebranded as Poly. See the end of this newsletter for what every Brit is thinking about that.
Axway Acquired Streamdata.io
The continued rise of real-time APIs and data.
Google Launched Stadia, which uses WebRTC
Google announced its gaming platform, Stadia. Which is another great WebRTC use case. Since most of the internet runs on its servers, its not a surprise Google is having a go.
Content is king in gaming, and it will be interesting to see if they are able to solve the lag issues. It’s all my 9 year old son and his friends say when playing networked games, ‘its lagging”; in part because of the dumbass YouTubers they watch. Here’s some early insight on Stadia’s latency.
For the telco folks thinking this is an edge compute use case, it isn’t, as edge compute will be a mess (the word cats and herding come to mind), and it offers a minor benefit compared to all the other challenges in real-time networked gaming. There are other use cases to focus on, mainly internal operations.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulations to Mike Dauphinais’ promotion to Product Manager at Voxbone. He’s a regular remote contributor to TADHack events!
Frank Geck has recently joined Mio as Director of Customer Success. Previously he has with Cisco and before that Tropo. Mio won the Best Innovation for Collaboration at Enterprise Connect, as discussed above.
Bruce Bales joins IMIMobile as Chief Executive Officer, North America. I’ve known Bruce for nearly 20 years, Glenayre were a reseller of Teltier, a start-up I co-founded that was painfully early to market in telecom APIs. Before this move Bruce was with Sinch (CLX). I’ve known IMIMobile for nearly as long, working with them back in 2004/5.
“Poly want a cracker?” Someone should have talked with the Brits about the renaming of Polycom/Plantronics to Poly. Here’s what all the Brits are thinking when they see ‘Poly‘.