CXTech Week 42, News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 42 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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Its been a Busy Weekend and Week, TADHack Global and TADSummit Americas, Phew!

Summary of TADHack Global 2019.

Over the weekend we ran TADHack Global (12-13 Oct), the largest CXTech focused hackathon in the world with hackathons running in parallel across Chicago, Popayán (Colombia), London, Berlin, Belgrade, Johannesburg, The Netherlands and even the comfort of your own home (remote entries).

Thanks to our global sponsors for making TADHack possible: Telesign (Mobile Identity, Trust), Simwood (Programmable Telecoms, Fraud Protection), and VoIP Innovations (Programmable Telecoms).

And thanks to all our local sponsors and supporters across the many locations: MTN, Inovo, IIT RTC Labs, Cluster Creatic, Aplisay, hSenid Mobile, IdeaLondon, Automat Berlin, Vio Networks, KPN API Store, and Speakup NL.

TADHackGlobal2019Day2

Summary of TADSummit Americas.

TADSummit Americas 2019 ran on the 15-16 Oct, in parallel with the IIT RTC Conference. This weblog provides a few pointers to navigating the world class content we created.

Thank you to TeleSign and Mio for sponsoring TADSummit Americas, all our partners (VoIP Innovations, Apidaze, IIT RTC Conf, IIT RTC Labs, Mind Commerce, Aplisay, The Fast Mode, Disruptive Analysis), all the world-class presenters, and both the in-person and remote attendees.

An important USP for TADSummit is ‘no BS’, this may seem like a ‘duh’ statement. But check out now much BS permeates the programmable telecoms / communications sector in my opening address. This clouds the decisions of many business and customers in programmable telecoms. We have to stamp it out, and demand more honest marketing / analysis. In this week’s newsletter I’m going to be referring back to the panels and presentations in TADSummit Americas.

TADSummitDays12

 

 

Telnyx Enters New Global Expansion Phase with European Offices in Dublin and Warsaw

While analysts focus on Twilio, Bandwidth (telco masquerading as a CPaaS), Vonage/Nexmo (CPaaS being assimilated by an enterprise focused telco), Mitel (not a public CPaaS). There’s loads of others like Telnyx, their business is growing, and they’re offering services that are much more sophisticated than Twilio. I reviewed the CPaaS market and its sizing / complexity at TADSummit Americas. You’ll see the market is more complex when you take a bottoms-up build approach. The TADSummit America’s Day 2 morning panel covered many of these points.

 

Amazon Connect vs Twilio Flex Comparison 2019

It’s not really a comparison in this article, rather a partial listing of features and saying they both offer it. But comparing these two offers is going to become more important as the mid-market opens up to contact center solutions, where price / simplicity / vertical solutions / local support matter much more than long list of relatively expensive features. Many of the members of the Asterisk community deliver contact centers to the mid-market with the above USP, I’ll be keynoting at Astricon this year, and gathering their views.

 

Looks like Cloud Communications is now a well-entrenched misleading term used by analysts.

Firstly, it’s nice to see Vonage getting recognition across its UC, CC and CPaaS offers. It’s an enterprise focused telco, and is offering the full range of services you’d expect from a leading telco. Just like AT&T. But whether its cloud, or hybrid, or hosted, or premise, or even the good old PSTN (aka the OC, Original Cloud). The customer really doesn’t notice, nor care about the implementation: the phone rings, the agent web-chats with a customer, employees review a customer pitch. Focusing on cloud is a distraction, its about services, the specific implementation is up to the customer and their needs. We need to get to a post-cloud world.

Also an implicit assumption is having UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS (often used as a catch all for business messaging, in-app communications, IoT, authentication/trust, and anything else that doesn’t fit in enterprise telephony / collaboration / contact center) is best. Enterprise telephony is definitely a winner takes all, while collaboration and contact center can be more workflow / business unit specific.

It’s the classic shadow IT problem. The reason most corporately selected services suck is because its chosen by someone who’s focus is covering everyone’s requirements, it’s usability for your group’s needs being a very small consideration. Solution diversity is not going away in the enterprise, unless the solution is very dumb, like a telephone call. Hence why enterprise telephony remains a winner takes all.

 

PanTerra Merges UCaaS and CPaaS with Streams APIs, Extensions and AppDesigner Trio

Nice to see the recognition that putting APIs on a UCaaS platform is not public CPaaS. Well done PanTerra. Essentially its offering public and private CPaaS, as defined in this CPaaS Segmentation weblog.

 

Twilio: Too Many Bulls

It’s going to be interesting to see how Twilio’s stock performs in 2020, with a broad bullish consensus and lots of hedge funds in there, performance through 2020 will need to be consistently at/above expectations. But if there is a dip, its because of investor gambling, rather than anything fundamentally wrong with the company.

 

Talkdesk Zoom Integration Creates Customer-Centric Contact Centers

This is just one example of many frothy hyperbole coming out of Zoomtopia. Seriously, customer-centric contact centers <shakes head>.

 

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congrats to Andrew Wishart who is now CTO Products, at Avanade, an Accenture-Microsoft JV focused on solution development on Microsoft products.

Sudarshan Dharmapuri is now EVP Products at IMIMobile (Business Messaging).

Congrats to Simon Wong, who is now Regional Client Architect – MuleSoft Asia (API Management).

Congrats to David Sharpley who is now CEO of Velocix (content delivery).

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