The purpose of this CXTech Week 43 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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Sangoma buys VoIP Innovations

The big news last week was Sangoma buying VoIP Innovations. The news came out late on Friday evening. Well done to the VoIP Innovations team, David Walsh, Jason Tapolci, John Elliott, Evin Hunt, Natalie DeCario, Harold Vance, Joe Aponick, Hugh Goldstein, and the rest of the team.

Now VoIP Innovations is part of Sangoma. Sangoma provides a broad range of enterprise communications products and services. Sangoma also runs the largest open source telecom community, Asterisk, and FreePBX. VoIP Innovations brings carrier services for North America, a CPaaS (programmability), and an interesting channel to market with its Showroom, I show the stack below. BTW Vonage have a copy of the Showroom known as the “Vonage App Center“.

Given Sangoma’s development skills and massive ecosystem, they can accelerate the adoption of Apidaze and the Showroom, and make its reach global. Currently, Apidaze includes FreeSWITCH, I wonder if they’ll migrate it over to Asterisk? Asterisk is used for CPaaS at scale in combination with other projects like OpenSIPS and Kamailio. From a geographic coverage perspective, they now have North America, but I wonder if more regional wholesale VoIP providers will be in Sangoma’s crosshairs?

See you at Astricon (29-30 Oct in Atlanta) where I’m sure this will be an interesting discussion topic. I’ll be covering this and more in my keynote, on ‘Show me the ‘UCing Money.’

 

3 reasons why you should consider using Phone Numbers within your Fraud Prediction models

Great article from Ravish Patel of TeleSign. Paraphrasing the article, the 3 reasons are:

• Phone Numbers are the unique identifier for most online identities. When we forget our login name or password (specially when they have lots of rules for valid names and passwords), its the mobile number that is the fall back for recovery.
• Phone Number have lots of information orthogonal to your online identity. For example, is the number black-listed, has it been ported recently, a name and address that can be correlated (without releasing any personal information) that is trust ratings.
• Your phone number does not change that often, mine is 20+ years old. At TADSummit Americas, the audience was asked and most people’s phone numbers were 10 years old at least. This means phone numbers can be used through out the life cycle on your online identity.

 

And Congrats to the TeleSign on Expanding its Global Services through Partnership with Proximus

Fraud such as account take over (ATO) through SIM swap and porting attacks can be significantly expensive to both end users and businesses. With the strength of Proximus’ insights and TeleSign’s expertise, this partnership will aid businesses in complying with the new EU Payment Services Directive, PSD2 and its two core use cases – Know Your Customer (KYC) and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).

“TeleSign helps its customers globally to protect and prevent fraudulent activity for the end user and businesses,” said Pierre Demarche, VP of Products at TeleSign. “Telesign has existing partnerships with other Mobile Operators in multiple geographies, and keeps expanding its partnership with Mobile Operators worldwide, so we have a deep understanding of how Mobile Identity can be leveraged to provide end-to-end security experience. This protection not only works to prevent costly fraud, but also enhances the user experience.”

I think the services TeleSign offers are also addressable to any business in the CXTech space, whether they are a CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, system integrator, wholesale or retail VoIP provider, or integrated providers like Sangoma. This market will explode over the coming 3 years.

 

Only 1 month to fo to TADSummit EMEA (19-20 Nov, London)

Check out all we achieved at TADSummit Americas last week, it was world-class. The panels are particularly worth your time. Some classic lines and great insights that I’m going to be reusing.

Its going to be a tough job, but TADSummit EMEA 2019 is going to be even better! With in-depth discussions on closing the gap with Twilio and open source implementation experiences. A ‘Industrial Innovation’ mixer session bringing a diverse range of industries together to explore how programmable telecoms can help solve their problems. Lots of case studies, and an afternoon focused on EMEA innovation.

Check out the TADSummit EMEA agenda, the people, panels, and presentations are second to none. Please make time in your diary to attend TADSummit EMEA.

A big thank you to our sponsors Wazo, VoIP Innovations, TeleSign, Automat Berlin, SiPalto for making TADSummit EMEA possible; IdeaLondon for the location; our many partners for promoting TADSummit EMEA; and everyone taking part.

 

Hmmm… Best CPaaS with 2 CCaaS, 2 UCaaS and one old-school messaging focused CPaaS listed.

Needless to say the misinformation on CPaaS have never been higher.

 

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Adnan Agboatwalla “Boat” is now director of Product Management at Cisco. I’ve known him since his Pixsense days.

Martin Körling is now Head of Global AI/ML Platforms, Global AI Accelerator, Ericsson.

Awful biased survey from IBM to justify 5G that makes no sense. 8k on a mobile display? 4K is a stretch for most phones, using the 3840 x 2160 definition of 4K. Also 4K streaming works on LTE it doesn’t need 5G. If “UHD video is by far the most relevant 5G application for consumers, selected by 57 percent of the respondents.” That’s a weird survey. Most TMO US customers who are on Binge-on are watching video at 480/720 happily. Most customers on their mobile phone can perceive the difference between 480 (DVD quality) / 720 (HD) and Full HD (1080).

But your viewing distance to see the difference between Full HD to UHD / 4k is going to screw your eyes up for the rest of the day, never mind lighting conditions / reflections / greasy finger prints on the screen. And 8K only makes sense on a big tablet or TV. We’ve got to reign in the ridiculous marketing materials that simply make no sense. Most US consumers think they are playing enough for mobile services, and 5G will not encourage them to pay more as 4G is good enough. Like fixed broadband several years ago, we’ve reached the limits of what the majority of customers need and are willing to pay for, 99% of us are not 1%ers.

Paretuem’s downfall continues…

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