The purpose of this CXTech Week 32 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.
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SignalWire Raises $11.5M Led by Storm Ventures
FreeSWITCH announced the closing of a $11.5 million series A funding round. Storm Ventures led the round joined by institutional investors Samsung NEXT and Sequoia Capital (Sequoia Scouts) and by Erik Yang (CEO, Zoom), Dean Drako (Founder, Barracuda Networks), Yahoo’s Jerry Yang (AME Cloud Ventures) and Ron Neuenberger (AngelFire). The funding will be used to accelerate the development of SignalWire’s Cloud communication platform, a new offering that allows developers to embed voice, messaging, and video capabilities into applications using advanced real-time APIs.
The pressure is on for the other CPaaS providers! Twilio continues to lead industry growth even with its large size. FreeSWITCH is the enabling technology of many CPaaS, and it’s now their competition with SignalWire. We live in interesting CPaaS times!
RIPP (Real Time Internet Peering Protocol)
RIPP (Real Time Internet Peering Protocol) is used to provide telephony peering between a trunking provider (such as a telco), and a trunking consumer (such as an enterprise, cloud PBX provider, cloud contact center provider, and so on). RIPP is an alternative to SIP, SDP and RTP for this use case, and is designed as a web application using HTTP/3.
WebRTC has to perform end-to-end bandwidth management as the device can be on a poor internet connection, it’s not really required for trunks. There is a risk, if the broadband interconnect becomes congested, but it can be managed in a number of ways in aggregate without having to make the determination on a per session set-up basis. It’s one of those protocols that leaves you asking, why wasn’t it been done already? The PSTN sort of has it.
Plus Five9 notified of an associated patent (US62/123456).
Comparing video conferencing services: We’re getting into a Rolls Royce versus Toyota Situation
I liked the comparison in this article as it highlights how rarefied the service comparisons have become.
For example:
Conference Feature: “Facial recognition: Webex meetings can identify and display the names and titles of all participants in a meeting. This is especially useful for identifying participants sharing a conference room video camera system.” Hmmmm…
Rolls Royce comparison: “And in the door is an umbrella, should you forgot yours and the weather turns inclement, you have one at-hand.”
Toyota version: “We do not have one, just keep an umbrella in the boot (trunk), its good enough.”
The facial recognition feature is cool. But most of us just need to talk with our team to share progress and confirm actions.
This is something I’ve noticed across enterprise messaging and collaboration services, businesses are adopting multiple services to meet a diversity of needs. I use Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, WhatsApp, for collaboration depending on need. Each has a role. While for business telephony it is a winner takes all.
WhatsApp is taking over at work: Are contextual apps the answer? (2016 article from Rob Pickering)
The statement from the article: “The promise of unified collaboration and communication in the workplace is an empty one; instead we’re seeing greater fragmentation as we use more tools and apps than ever.” It’s still true today. It also jives with the above article on collaboration.
Whether it’s contextual communications, or simply adopting secure and easy to use messaging clients like Matrix (as announced at TADSummit last year by the French government) or Wire, I think is an interesting discussion point as we do using multiple messaging apps depending on the context on the communications. That is we decide, not an app.
WIRE has focused on simplicity of user experience. Many Slack competitors do so was well. And its not just in enterprise messaging. Many VARs in UC also focus on experience, making their own terminals and UIs, to just make UC as easy to use as possible.
Trying to be anything to anyone can end up being nothing to nobody. I remember making that same comment about a Lucent product called AnyMedia, 20 years ago, and history showed what happens in trying to be all things to all people in the access network 😉
MOBILE IDENTITY COULD BE YOUR ANSWER FOR FRICTION AND COMPLIANCE WITH PSD2
Mastercard suggested that up to 20% of mobile e-commerce transactions are abandoned mid-way. One of the markets most heavily affected was the Indian market, so Mastercard needed a way to combat churn and lost revenues in India. This led Mastercard to announce Identity Check Express.
With Identity Check Express many low value transactions will be completely frictionless and rely on certain known device data points. For higher transactions above 2,000 Indian rupees a one time passcode (OTP) will be sent to a user’s device to authorize the payment.
Trust and communications go hand in hand, it needs to be built in to both customer and employee communication systems. As an enabler across CPaaS and business messaging providers.
Telesign will show you how to add them into your solutions at TADSummit Americas and TADSummit EMEA. AND you’ll also get hands-on experience of Telesign’s solutions by hacking with them at TADHack Global in October!
Well Done Voxist!
In June the US user base surpassed the French user base and is now growing at 5x its speed!
Customer experience technology spending to exceed $600bn by 2022 — IDC
IDC defines CX as a functional activity encompassing business processes, strategies, technologies and services that companies use, irrespective of industry, to provide a better experience for their customer and to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Sort of the point of being in business…. I guess its another big number to quote and use the popular term “customer experience”. I feel it’s being used as much as digital transformation these days to generically justify products and services.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulations to Ayan Halder is now Product GTM Manager for Mobile Identity at Telesign.
Sean Hennessey is now Senior Director, Channel Marketing at Kerauno (UC and Business Messaging) previously with Mitel
Well done Anthony Wong, who is now a consultant at EY, Data & Analytics. He’s a TADHack winner. We’re salting people who know about programmable telecoms everywhere around the world 😉
Hiroyuki Fujiwara is now Account Director at Splunk (Data Analytics). I’ve know him since his time at OCBU (Oracle Communications Business Unit).