The purpose of this CXTech Week 4 2020 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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UCSummit Virtual Expo is currently running, I did a piece for the event on “Open Source Telecom Software is the Keystone of Our Industry”. And mention of TADSummit Asia.
UCSummit don’t seem to have uploaded the video yet, there’s some old content of mine (scroll to the bottom of the conference section, it takes a bit of time as there are lots of videos) from TADSummit 2018, “State of the Union: ConvTech, From Communications to Conversations“. But I show the fresher content I created below.
We are planning a virtual event for TADSummit Asia in May 2020, we already have Sangoma, VoIP Innovations and Asterisk as sponsors of that event (website coming soon). While I think virtual events make sense, the freshness of content is critical, and the focus of the event.
My main driver for making TADSummit Asia virtual is because Asia is the most diverse market in the world. While I have more people from Asia asking me to run an event there than for the Americas. When we tried to run an in-person event in KL last year, we struggled to get people to travel even from Singapore (30 min flight). Unfortunately, Singapore is beyond the budget of TADS. So while the interest in TADSummit in Asia has not yet reached critical mass for an in-person event, a virtual event is a great way to discuss relevant issues such as:
- Role of open source telecom software in enterprises, integrators, and service providers throughout Asia;
- What segments of programmable telecoms work in Asia? Clearly text-based marketing remains a significant component of CPaaS. However, its complicated by IP Messaging, which varies on a country-by-country basis; as does SMS regulation given the sins of the past with A2P SMS.
- Given literacy rates in some regions in Asian, voice also plays a more significant role for accessibility of services.
- And I always remember a discussion on UC in KL 3 years ago, where an enterprise owner pointed out his mobile phone has voice and messaging, all his contacts are on this phone, it has a browser so he can access all his business processes (purchases, invoicing, payments, returns, etc.). So what value does “UC” give him, especially when the monthly price for the UC service was almost the same as his mobile phone plan. He just kept on laughing as the UC sales person tried to pitch the benefits, especially when video collaboration was mentioned. Asia is diverse and different to the west!
TADHack-mini Phoenix, 1-2 Feb, Prize Categories Posted
We published the prize categories for TADHack-mini Phoenix, just before Avaya ENGAGE, just scroll down the the Developer Resources section and you’ll see them.
- Education: for example making education more accessible through using Avaya’s resources in the classroom.
- Healthcare: for example alerts, reminders, support applications, IoT devices like fitness/health trackers, to help patients and healthcare providers achieve better health outcomes.
- Energy & Environment: for example promoting the use of green energy or enforcing / raising awareness of environmental policies.
- St. Mary’s Food Bank: Today we only have a webpage where people can enter their zip code or what they are specifically looking for (a hot meal, a non-perishable food box, fresh produce) and see what services are available to them close by, http://www.azfoodbanks.org/index.php/foodbank/index/. We’d like to improve access to this service across voice, text, or an app on people’s phones.
I’m excited the hackathon will be relevant to the local community through the St. Mary’s Food Bank category. We also have Google Cloud as a partner for the event.
TADHack-mini Orlando, 28-29 March, sponsor ‘dance card’ is now full!
Thank you to our sponsors for making TADHack-mini Orlando possible: Inference Solutions, IntelePeer, Simwood, Sangoma, Apidaze and Asterisk.
There’s a great article in NoJitter on the event: TADHack-mini Orlando Chats It Up With Intelligent Agents.
To register go here. If you’re attending Enterprise Connect there’s simply no better place to get hands-on experience and understand the reality of the technology.
CPaaS provider Melrose Labs Launched
Mark Hay, founded Hay Systems Ltd / HSL Mobile, a UK-based SMS aggregator, in 1999. That business was sold to LINK Mobility Group of Oslo, Norway in December 2018. Mark has now launched CPaaS provider Melrose Labs.
Mark will be at MWC 2020, though my advice would be to avoid the event as its the temple of the 5G cult, which considers telephony commoditized. Which of course is driving the growth in CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS revenues as telcos walk away from enterprise communications, instead chasing butterflies of autonomous 5G cars, mobile edge compute, and robotic surgery.
Twilio: Over-Hyped Valuation Doesn’t Make Sense Given Competitive Threats
The error in this analysis is it assumes Twilio’s TAM is defined by only CPaaS (which is a poorly defined category at best), of $11 billion. It ignores business messaging (mobile marketing), content center (which FLEX is an almost full offer), SIP trunking, multi-factor authentication, workflow management, enterprise communications, the list goes on. The TAM is more like $200B.
Aircall Announces Strategic Partnership with Converged Network Services Group (CNSG)
Aircall (aircall.io), a phone and contact center provider (UCaaS/CCaaS), is partnering with Converged Network Services Group (CNSG). CNSG is one of the largest master agents in the U.S. that will offer UCaaS and CCaaS solution through thousands of its partners nationwide. Channel to market is critical, and this given Aircall the channel is needs.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Natalie DeCario will be leaving VoIP Innovations after 7+ years to become the External Affairs Coordinator at Cabot Oil & Gas in Pittsburgh.
Congratulations to Tim Houlihan who is now a Strategic Account Manager at Vonage. Previously Telefonica and before that tyntec.
Congratulations to Ricky Gill who is now Senior Product Manager at MATRIXX Software. I’ve known him since his Redknee days.
Congratulation to Alexander Berry who is now a Member of the Acceleration Team @ World Economic Forum. He was previously with Nexmo/Vonage.
Congratulations to Samantha Warren who is now the Communications Manager at appliedAI Initiative. She was previously with tyntec.
Afrar Malakooth has become an Engineer of Technology at Virtusa
Martin Coates is now Principal Product Manager – Vodafone Business Ventures at Vodafone
Alexey Rusakov is now a Senior Solution Architect, Telco Technology Office at Red Hat