The purpose of this CXTech Week 39 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.
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.
AstriCon is going to be fun!
So many big corporate events are stage managed to the point of boredom, filled with corporate speak and buzzword bingo (digital, AI, disruption, innovation, etc.), you leave feeling less informed than when you arrived. With Astricon that is never the case, and to whet your appetite for an excellent and fun event we had some controversy this week.
It began with a weblog Jim Machi wrote entitled, “Is it Possible to Outgrow an Open Source PBX?” that is similar to one he did before Sangoma bought Digium. However, it does tread close to a misconception that open source doesn’t scale. It does, I see it everyday, and Fred Posner will be sharing how to do that with Kamailio at Astricon, Three Reasons why you need Kamailio.
Now Jim was not talking about scaling, simply maintenance burden when you roll you own, and then get too busy as the organization grows and priorities change. But as the new custodians of Asterisk, their words and actions are watched closely by the community, the community LOVES Asterisk, so the new custodian better equally love and cherish it. Especially at this transition point. I’ll be discussing this at my keynote at Astricon, based on the open source telecom project I did before the summer.
Fred then published this weblog entitled, SANGOMA DOESN’T GET OPEN SOURCE. One of the things I love about the open source community is everything is just out there. Disagreements are often aired publicly, its great! Sangoma would be crazy to not support the largest, most influential, oldest hence original, open source telecom (communications if you prefer) project – since 1999.
Jim responded with So…about yesterday…, to make his point clearer. All I can say is, AstriCon is going to be fun! For many commercial organizations washing dirty laundry in public may seem perverse, but that’s what comes with being the custodian of important open source projects, because of all the love than comes with it 😉
TADHack Global and TADSummit Americas get into high gear
If you subscribe to any of my feeds you’re likely painfully aware of what is going on with TADHack Global and TADSummit Americas. And over the next couple of weeks its going to get even worse! Just like, retweet and forward to get the message out. It will soon be over 😉
Simwood, a global sponsor of TADHack, wrote a great piece. They’ll have people at TADHack Johannesburg, Chicago, London, and Berlin. I’m so happy we’ll finally have a global sponsor at Joburg. I was hoping to be there this year, but TADSummit America immediately after TADHack and crazy flight costs meant I couldn’t make it. TADHack Global and TADSummit are run on shoe-string budgets.
We reviewed all the achievements of TADHack London over the years.
Similarly for TADHack Chicago, which this year will be held at the IIT’s prestigious Kaplan Institute.
And the IIT’s Illinois Tech Today magazine has started promoting TADHack and TADSummit Americas across its 7000+ students.
Tyntec Podcast with Dr. Mark Smith from ContactEngine
In Part 2 of the Conversational AI episode, Dr. Mark Smith from ContactEngine talks to Jean about the signs a company is ready to test a point solution powered by AI – and how to choose the right communication channel to use.
My take is know your customers, across the many situations an individual customer will be in. And alert, is not just an alert, the customer’s context is critical to determining which is the most appropriate channel. We’ll be discussing this topic at TADSummit America in Chicago, 15-16 Oct:
“Omnichannel is dead! The goal is not to be everywhere, nor is it to be seamless or unified. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. How can the programmable telecoms deliver harmonized customer experiences. For example, a flight delay notification results in a push message so my airline’s app can fire up with other flight options, while an on-time notification is sent by SMS, and all the bloody email notifications stop!”
Case study: GlobeAir integrates Tyntec’s WhatsApp Business Solutions
GlobeAir, a European provider of on-demand private jet charter flights, partnered with Tyntec’s WhatsApp Business Solution to increase revenue while also improving customer experience and personalization. As a result of the collaboration, GlobeAir saw a 27 per cent increase in sales leads, a 20 per cent jump in last-minute flight bookings, and a 225 per cent increase in average speed of first answers to clients.
That last figure is the biggie, WhatsApp is more connected than SMS. In many countries people respond much faster on WhatsApp than with SMS as its their preferred messaging (communications) platform.
Tech Omens – Issue 40 – 25 September 2019
I’ve great respect for Hugh Bradlow, previously CTO of Telstra. I recommend you sign up to the Tech Omens newsletter, they are short and always worth a read. While CTO of Telstra, he pointed out the idiocy of IMS 10 years ago, today, billions spent and all it does is support telephony. The adoption rate of IMS followed my predictions, and the ‘strategic’ vendors have painted telcos into an ever diminishing circle in real time communications. Seriously, the open source telecoms / communications community has what telcos need, especially if they do telephony in IP.
Centurylink Acquired Streamroot
CenturyLink announced they had acquired privately held Streamroot, a CDN provider with an underlying P2P technology using WebRTC. Streamroot had raised $6M to date and the company is expected to do sub-$5M in revenue for this year. Based on what Streamroot’s valuation would have been for a Series A round, CenturyLink valued the company between $20M-$30M. I’ve tracked Streamroot since it began as it used WebRTC.
Bandwidth Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape for Worldwide CPaaS
Bandwidth are strong in North America, expanding internationally, but a worldwide leader like Twilio, Telesign or Vonage is a bit of a stretch.
Massive Growth for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Market by Focusing on Key Players – AT&T, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Google, HP, Microsoft, Orange Business Services, Verizon Enterprises Solutions
Disagree with this analysis, telcos do not own their technology. It’s a resale. Margins are getting squeezed as their technology suppliers compete with them, as well as a myriad of other providers. Their customer now realize telcos are not the exclusive provider of telephony. I’ll be reviewing a quantified analysis on the squeeze happening on telcos wrt UC / business telephony / enterprise telecoms at Astricon and at TADSummit EMEA and Americas.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulations to Ivan Livic who is now VP Marketing at Apigate, a telco CPaaS enabler and content aggregator.
Well done to Jeremy Wells who is now Product Manager Games at Opensignal. Opensignal tracks mobile network performance and Jeremy focuses on its performance for gaming.
Sort of linked to Apigate is: Kumi Thiruchelvam is now Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Crypto Quantique, a quantum driven cybersecurity company addressing the growing challenges of end-to-end IoT security. Kumi was previously the CEO of WSO2.Telco, that became Apigate.
Kevin Summers if now Senior Director of Product Management at Mavenir.
Congratulation to Riza Alaudin Syah is now Head of IoT at Bukalapak. He’s a TADHack winner, here’s his hack from TADHack Japan 2016, homebot.
Linked to the Centurylink acquisition of Streamroot, Nikolay Rodoinov is now VP operations of Content Delivery Services at CenturyLink.
Well done Todd Carothers, who is now Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at CounterPath.
Pareteum: More Dilution To Avoid Potential Debt Default And Keep The Lights On
And yet another CPaaS claim, this time Kirusa, its really business messaging, and more telco enabler than provider.