CXTech Week 52, News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 52 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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Best Wishes for 2020 🙂

 

Aircall Introduces its Ecosystem for Voice at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin

In the past 4 years Aircall has hired over 300 employees for two offices in Paris and New York City, acquiring 4000+ clients from 100+ countries, and raising just over $41M in funding. It still runs on Twilio, which is surprising given Twilio is competition. Aircall offers both phone systems and call centers (like Twilio FLEX).

Aircall recently hired Gary Hardie from Telnyx, see people moves below, which shows they’re getting serious about removing a competitor’s app server.

They announced an App Marketplace, and the introduction of 50+ integrations with widely used business technologies such as Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, Segment, Shopify. This has become table stakes for many modern phone systems and call centers.

The App Marketplace includes integrations such as Gorgias, an eCommerce helpdesk platform, and new startups such as Postcall.io, a survey application for capturing after-call feedback built specifically to serve Aircall’s customers.

 

Congratulations to Matrix.org on another Government win, this time with the German Ministry of Defense

Last year Matrix were presenting at TADSummit 2018 on their win with the French Ministry. And this year it’s with the German Ministry of Defense.  Their vision of secure, decentralized, (and federated where appropriate) communications is being realized.

 

How the UK Home Office’s Immigration Technology department reduced its cloud costs by 40%

A nice summary of straight forward / common sense practices to achieve 40% cost savings on existing cloud usage.  Its a good check-list for any medium to large cloud implementation.

The Home Office team use the cloud as their primary hosting platform and the department is one of the biggest cloud users in the UK government. The Immigration Technology department has over 500 developers working on immigration projects.

 

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Gary Hardie has left Telnyx to join Aircall. This continues the pattern which began about a decade ago with GroupMe, where companies gain attention / prove-out their business model and then consolidate value as Twilio has a margin of 200-300% on telco wholesale rates on voice. With messaging it can be even higher for inbound.

Robin Hattink is now program manager B2B2C at Vodafone Ziggo. I’ve known Robin since his time at KPN.

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