The purpose of this CXTech Week 22 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 2 discussions.
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.
USING 2FA TO PREVENT ACCOUNT TAKEOVER
Google’s security blog put out data this week that shows that 2FA is the best defense against most account hacks. Simple SMS based 2FA can prevent 100% of account takeover attacks coming from automated bots and was up to 27% more effective when compared to a knowledge-based challenge.
SMS code was 96% effective at shutting down phishing attacks and 76% more likely to shut down a targeted attack, something that only one in a million users will face.
Along with SMS authentication, enterprises should check if the phone number had a recent lifecycle change (ported, swapped or recycled) in the past few days. This is a good practice along with sending SMS or voice calls that can prevent diabolical SIM Swap or Porting attacks, like this poor guy who lost six figures in his sleep. If you’re new to the concept of using carrier data to protect against these more elaborate fraud schemes, check this out for a crash course.
We’ll be covering identity and authentication in more detail at TADSummit Americas and TADSummit EMEA. All CXTech providers should have this in their portfolio.
Open Source Telecom Software Project Survey
The purpose of this survey is to gather people’s experiences and opinions on using Open Source Telecom Software Projects. I’ll share an anonymized aggregate view of the survey with those that compete the survey. I’ll also present a high-level summary for some of the results at TADSummit EMEA in November, where we have a session on “The Emerging Programmable Telecoms Architecture: Threats and Opportunities.”
I’m often asked to comment on the different open source projects, typical implementation architectures, and answer the usual worries on availability, performance, and what-ifs. This is an attempt to provide something more authoritative than my opinions based on who I last talked to. My role here is simply as someone who has working in and promoted programmable telecoms (CXTech) for the past 2+ decades, to help us all be more successful. Please circulate this around your contacts, the more feedback, the more insights and accuracy we will have, thanks.
Bandwidth Goes Direct to The Enterprise
This article left me a little perplexed as Bandwidth have been selling direct to enterprises for several years as far as I’m aware. I had one of their analyst relations people introduce me to one of their enterprise customer several years ago. Twilio, Telesign, VoIP Innovations, Sinch, and many more have been selling direct to enterprise for years. The interesting thing is these companies have realized enterprises are generally not looking for APIs, rather easy to consume services.
At TADSummit Asia Roshni Hewamallika of hSenid Mobile gave a great keynote on eCPaaS, enterprise CPaaS. Its all about web-based wizards that solve specific vertical business problems, in a self-service model for marketing to use, under IT control. CPaaS is getting to the point enterprises can do it themselves. hSenid Mobile will be sponsoring the Chicago location of TADHack Global this year. Giving people a chance to hack on eCPaaS, and we’ll see the results of those hacks presented at TADSummit Americas.
Just say’in, there’s no other event that leads in CXTech like TADS 😉
Five9 vs. Twilio – Which Cloud Contact Center Software is Best for CX?
Its a bit of a dodgy comparison as Twilio Flex is an enabler, not a full blown service. Just another example of why you should not believe what’s written on the internet unless it’s undergone peer view by experts in the field.
RingCentral: A Platform for Development
This one missed the categorization of RingCentral’s private CPaaS. This weblog provides more insight on CPaaS segmentation. You’ve got to have bought RingCentral for the platform to make sense. So don’t get is confused with the public CPaaS providers.
TADSummit Asia, hSenid Mobile eCPaaS and Unified Self-Care
On Tuesday 28th May 8AM NYC / 5:30 PM Colombo Sri Lanka we ran a webinar with Roshni Hewamallika and Sandarenu Madan Arachchige of hSenid Mobile. The purpose of this webinar is to provide the TADSummit Asia keynote from hSenid Mobile on Enterprise CPaaS (eCPaaS, Communication Platform as a Service) and their Omni-channel customer engagement platform presentation. You can see the webinar and download the slides in this weblog.
The current state of SIP trunking
I good paper on the state of SIP trunking from Masergy. Too often I see the operational challenges of SIP trunking glossed over. This paper is relatively fair and balanced. There are many SIP trunking providers to choose from, an important selection criteria is the depth of expertise in SIP. As the devil really is in the SIP details in getting your current systems ported over and working reliably.
How much time do we waste on conference calls?
A good article to remind us that video is not the new voice. Voice still dominates conferencing.
Pareteum Rang the Opening Bell at Nasdaq
They’ve moved beyond their CPaaS positioning, now using Experience Cloud. Which given the breadth of their offers, makes more sense. But they remain squarely in the CXTech category.
Zendesk buys Smooch.io
Smooch is a messaging aggregator. It connects its customers’ software to any messaging channel, unifying all customer interactions into a persistent omni-channel conversation. This enables Zendesk to bring the aggregation in house.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
TADHack-mini Orlando winner Eric Good has moved to become a Mobile Engineer at GolfNow, a division of Golf Channel. We hope wining TADHack helped 🙂
AND
TADHack-mini Orlando winner Vincent Tang has moved to become a Frontend developer at theLinc, Aquatic / Waterpark design bid software in Laravel Vue. We hope wining TADHack helped 🙂
Their hack was called CallNection by German Gamboa, Garrett Curtis, Vincent Tang, and Eric Good won prizes from Flowroute, Telesign, and VoIP Innovations. Its an interesting take on the anonymous chat chat scenario. The scenario of Harold and Peaches getting to know each other was another comedic masterpiece.
Eric and Vince are on the LHS
Edo Segal in now Open Innovation Lead at Amdocs.
Pascal Pettinicchio is now Senior Director, Technology Alliances at Zendesk after the acquisition of Smooch.
Mark Shuttleworth on Taking Canonical Public, Legacy IT and Ubuntu, and his Botanical Garden
Canonical and Mark have been supported of TADS since the beginning. Mark gave the opening keynote at TADHack in 2014. The article is an interesting review on the state of cloud computing, his plans to taking Canonical public, and he’s building a botanical garden at his home on the Isle of Man (where I was born and grew up).