The purpose of this CXTech Week 6 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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TADHack-mini Phoenix Summary, Photos and Videos, We even made the local news 🙂
TADHack-mini Phoenix in partnership with Avaya ENGAGE ran on the 1st and 2nd February. This was the first time we’ve run an event in Phoenix, a big thank you to Phoenix developer and technology community for your support, including PHX DEVS, {az}devs, #yesphx, ASU, UAT, and many more.
We ended up with over 100 registrations across in-person and remote. For in-person we bust through our estimates and had to bring in additional tables and chairs. You can see all the pitch videos in the TADHack-mini Phoenix 2020 YouTube playlist.
We even made it into the local news, Arizona Daily Star.
Dan Miller gave a a nice LinkedIn post on TADHack-mini Phoenix, see below.
AND coming up on the 28-29 March we have TADHack-mini Orlando, just before Enterprise Connect 2020. TADHack-mini Orlando is sponsored by: 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.
8X8 Inc (EGHT) Q3 2020 Earnings Call Transcript
8X8 recently bought Wavecell (and Asia-based CPaaS), I also mentioned in last week’s CXTech Week 5 newsletter Matthew Bell is now 8X8’s EMEA VP Sales for CPaaS.
What’s interesting is this section of the earnings transcript on how 8X8 position CPaaS:
“We continue to build traction with large multinational customers, including signing a leading food retailer with more than 1,000 outlets across the Asia Pacific region. This enterprise customer will use our CPaaS SMS solution to improve their consumer delivery service. Additionally, we are very excited to have deployed our initial voice CPaaS services, bringing expertise and capabilities from our X Series platform to our portfolio of CPaaS offerings. We now have several production customers on our voice CPaaS services, including a new contract with one of the largest and fastest-growing ride-hailing and digital service companies in Southeast Asia. Our strategy of coupling CPaaS capabilities with voice, chat, video and contact center opens up a huge opportunity for us to penetrate our installed customer base and expands the differentiated use case we can deliver with our single technology platform.”
The key points are:
- Its not about copying what Twilio does in CPaaS. Note Twilio is much more than a CPaaS player, its an Enterprise Communications Service provider / enabler;
- It’s not about APIs, though they are a necessary component. Its about services tied to their core offer of contact center;
- For 8X8, CPaaS a programmable layer missing on the existing contact center. They already had carrier relationships, omni channel, and video support. Its all about the services!
TWILIO Q4 2019 EARNINGS REPORTS REVENUE MISS – NO LONGER THE NEXT SOFTWARE DARLING ON WALL STREET?
Ignore the Twilio volatility, most analysts still don’t understanding Twilio’s business, and many are still choosing to “believe” based on what other analysts have said. Twilio’s Q4 2019 earnings had a revenue of $306.6M which missed analysts’ targets of $312.85M. EPS came in at $0.04 which beat analysts’ targets of $0.01.
I recently had a brief conversation with a PE firm about CPaaS. I told them to ignore the hype around developer engagement, its important (a necessary condition), but does not fundamentally determine the CPaaS successes we’ll see going forward. Rather focus on the lines of business: SIP trunking, contact center, customer communications, authentication, etc. The call ended shortly after that as I clearly wasn’t preaching the beliefs they wanted to hear about what drives CPaaS success 😉
Here’s another CPaaS to the list Stringee
Established in 2017, Stringee is a Vietnamese communications programming provider. It currently serves more than 500 corporate customers, including Golden Gate, MobiFone, VietinBank, VNDirect, DatXanh Group, PTI Post Insurance, and Be Group, and over 40 million end users via its system. With the capacity to serve over hundreds of million users, Stringee successfully closed a Pre-Series A investment round last year.
Stringee is calling for Series A capital to accelerate the development of Stringee products and to launch them in foreign markets. In recognition of Stringee’s achievements, the communications provider won the most prestigious prize of Nhan Tai Dat Viet 2018 in the field of Information Technology.
Asia is an interesting market, its quite fragmented, with many regional CPaaS popping up. We’re going to discuss this in more detail at TADSummit Asia in May (more details coming soon).
More Bloody Cloud Alliances, this time Cloud Voice
I’ve discussed previously how we need to move past this obsession with the Cloud prefix. Most enterprises do not care whether the service is hosted, cloud, hybrid, serverless, micro-services based, etc. The PSTN to them looks like a cloud service as there’s no equipment on their premises. If you have to use Cloud in your title its already passé, tell you what, how about the Cloud AI Digital Transformation Alliance.
Alliances in my experience institutionalize a worldview that focuses on maintaining the existence of the Alliance, to the detriment of its members. Up until the point most of its members realize the fees / time are not worth the investment, and it either ‘joins forces’ with another struggling Alliance, or simply fades away as the organizers move onto forming yet another Alliance.
Openness is the key, an Alliance creates a club, where you are either in to out, and group-think follows. That is why TADSummit published everything for the benefit of the industry and the people taking part. Plus we have an explicit no-BS policy, Alliances too quickly start pumping the larger members’ corporate BS.
How Cloud Communications Can Transform Your Relationship with Customers
OMG, this is an appalling article. Cloud Communications does NOT transform your relationship with customers. It’s a piece of the puzzle, but you have to do so much more. And the answer is not exclusively hidden in adoption of cloud-based services. You can use on-premise or hybrid, and achieve even better results as your organization incrementally adopts faster and cheaper ways of meeting customers needs. If someone tells you adopting X technology will transform your business, show them the door.
Don’t Use the Coronavirus as an Excuse not to attend MWC, Use The Fact your Time and Money can be better spent elsewhere!
(Edited from a post on LinkedIn) Do you really need more indoctrination on the ‘5G revolution’ <sigh>, or more digital transformation mumbo jumbo, or 2020 will be the year of RCS, or AIoT (AKA IoT 2.0, as IoT 1.0 didn’t meet revenue projections)? MWC is an event past its prime, where most of the attendees already meet each other through the year in their offices. Plus video calls/confs really do work, save time, the environment, and your cash. Ignore the coronavirus, evaluate whether your time and money could be better spent elsewhere. MWC is group-think at its worst, think different!
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulation to Paul Drew who is now an Independent Director at The British Mountaineering Council. I’ve known him since his time at MetaSwitch (which goes back a long way).
Congrats to David Saadat who is now Customer Success Director, Nordics at MuleSoft. Prior to this move he was with Appdirect, and before that working on APIs for TeliaSonera. MuleSoft has hired many API experts over the passed 4/5 years.
Naresh Chouhan is now EMEA Marketing Director at Cloudian Inc. I’ve known Naresh since his time at Orange when my start-up (Telteir) was trialing our presence API / platform 20 years ago. Yes, we were crazy early to market.
Frederik Bijlsma is now Head of Sales CEMEA Tanzu. I first met Frederik at Telestax,
Mike Bromwich is no longer with Partitionware, I assume a transaction is underway.
Alec Saunders is now Senior Director – ISV Engagement and Evangelism, Microsoft Business Applications at Microsoft. I remember Alec’s Voice 2.0 Manifesto from 2005. 15 years ago! Time flies…
Rita Barry is now Strategic Cloud Alliances Manager at Ensono
Karl Penaluna has left BT and is an Independent consultant and mentor at Penaluna Consultancy. With Graham Baxter and Phil Sheppard leaving 3UK at the start of this year and now Karl, the mind-trust of the telcos is disappearing. Vendors will run more and more of telcos’ networks.
Brian Schnack is now Senior Director of Product Management at Five9
Ben Toner is Associate Senior Analyst at Omnisperience
Ed O’Hara is now CEO of Inteliquent.