CXTech Week 9 2020, News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 9 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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RingCentral’s CFO Talks About Competing Against Microsoft, Cisco and Others

Interesting review of how RingCentral competes in the market. They’ve been on a roll for several years, RingCentral is worth $20.5 billion, or a lofty 18 times the midpoint of its 2020 revenue guidance range of $1.125 billion to $1.135 billion.

The CFO claims customers choose them for 2 reasons:

  • “One is a seamless unified experience we have…for all modalities. We are able to give our customers a seamless application that ties voice, video and team messaging together in one umbrella.”
  • “And the second is our open platform. We have over 3,000 integrations, 30,000 developers, so customers can actually build on our platform and have custom integrations, so that we are integrated with licensed businesses there.”

I see Glip (their messaging client) in the category ‘its there coz IT bought it”. Most enterprises continue to use multiple messaging and collaboration platforms. It’s the second point, the integrations, I see driving many selection decisions. The CFO gives a nice example from Waitrose in the UK.

The other point I found interesting is the addressable market appears rather limited, to 400 million seats. This indicates they’re focused on mid-market and above. Which means the long tail do not need to worry about RingCentral competition yet.

TADHack-mini Orlando, 28-29 March

We’re back in Orlando for TADHack-mini Orlando #4, the weekend before Enterprise Connect 2020! You can see what we got up to at TADHack-mini Orlando 2019, as well as 2018, and 2017.

What? It’s a hackathon about using the Apidaze, Asterisk, Inference Solutions, Intelepeer, and Simwood resources to solve problems that matter to you in your work, home and community life. A focus for this year is intelligent assistants / bots.

Who? Anyone who’s interested, web dev skills will help.

Why? To showcase the power of sponsors’ resources, network with great people, and possibly win some of the $5k in prizes + other goodies (free access to Enterprise Connect 2020 – previous winners can tell you about all the fun stuff).

But I’m going to Code Camp! We’re stretching the TADHack agenda so you can still attend Code Camp, then come over to TADHack on Saturday late afternoon / evening, and have more time on Sunday. We’re going to help you have a jam-packed and very successful weekend!

But what about COVID-19? We’ve always accepted remote entries. So whether you’re not able to make it to Orlando in-person, or you’re avoiding crowds because of COVID-19, you can still take part. I’ll be in Orlando looking forward to all your entries.

Go to the TADHack Orlando site to learn more about the excellent resources from Apidaze, Asterisk, Inference Solutions, Intelepeer, and Simwood.

TADHack Orlando

TADHack Global Prep, 10th / 11th October, Call for Locations

We have TADHack Global planned for the weekend of October 10th / 11th (Saturday and Sunday). Website is coming soon.

TADHack Global is the largest global hackathon for 6 years straight, since the first TADHack in 2014, and 2020 will make it 7 years. You can see some of what we’ve achieved here: http://blog.tadhack.com/2018/11/09/reviewing-5-years-of-tadhack/.  The TADHack YouTube channel has had over 2.5k hours of viewing from 70k views.

Given COVID-19 one or two locations may run online this year rather than in-person, we’ll ensure TADHack Global happens in the safest way for everyone involved. We have always accepted remote entries at TADHack, ever since our first TADHack in 2014.

In September we’ll finalize the exact plans location by location. Regardless, we’ll be hacking together both in-person and over the internet on the 10th and 11th October. A great demonstration of how communications enables us to JFDI regardless of the situation.

If you’re interested in running a TADHack Global location whether its in-person or online please let me know.

Widespread Digitalisation to Promote Adoption of UCaaS and Hosted IP Telephony

A recent analysis by Frost & Sullivan forecasts that the hosted IP telephony and UCaaS services market in the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a CAGR of 23% between 2019 and 2025, with revenues reaching $3.5 billion (€3.24 Billion). The total installed base is also predicted to increase by 29% in the same time period.

I think overall the numbers are fair, however, the reasoning is weak as digitalization has little to do with it. What’s interesting is the fragmented nature of the APAC market means we’re going to see many more vendors, e.g. regionally focused champions winning business. Than just the North American big 5: Avaya / RingCentral, Mitel, Cisco, Microsoft, and 8X8. And just as importantly open source is going to play a significant role in the APAC market for employee communications.

TADSummit EMEA will be in Aveiro, Portugal, 10-11 November

A big thank you to GoContact for hosting TADSummit EMEA at the recently renovated offices in Aveiro, Portugal, on 10-11 November. Their offices are a 5 minute walk from the train station.

Aveiro is the most important city in Portugal for telecoms since the university there is the best one in telecoms. Portugal Telecom was born there; Fuze, Talkdesk, and of course GoContact are all there! And its only one hour away from Coimbra, so we may even see the WIT Software folks 😉

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to both Evin Hunt, who is CTO at thinQ; and thinQ who’s gained a great CTO. I’ve talked about thinQ a few times, https://alanquayle.com/?s=thinq. And of course Evin for most of the past decade. This combo in interesting. thinQ is pragmatic and winning business, with Evin this could create an entity with deep telecom and cloud infrastructure roots. Nothing is ever certain, but this is interesting combination, my hope is they don’t sell too soon and build out a powerhouse.

Well done to Nadine (Brendel) Rothkamp who is now Consumer Marketing Lead Germany – Alexa at Amazon. I’ve known Nadine since her time leading marketing for DT’s Developer Garden.

Congratulations to Ayoub Cherkaoui who is now Business Solution Manager at Ericsson, focused on 5G/IMS video solutions. I’m sure a welcome break from RCS 😉

Congratulations to Jose A. Valles who is now VP, Chief Operating Officer CX EMEA South at SAP. I’ve know Jose since in time in Telefonica BlueVia, trying to help an operator be successful in CPaaS / Telecom APIs.

Well done to Douglas Waller who is now Senior Product Manager at Axon (body cameras for law enforcement). We worked together on TADHack when he was with Flowroute (now part of Intrado).

Patrick Scodeller, recently retired CTO/COO of M1 in Singapore, is now a Board Member at HAUD, that provides fraud detection and spam filtering for mobile network operators.

Cequens New Chief Commercial Officer is Wael Ali. Ali’s been with Vodafone, Raya (large BPO provider in the Middle East that Sammy Khalifa joined, mentioned in last week’s CXTech newsletter), and LinkdotNet, across MENA, Europe, and APAC region. Cequens have sponsored TADSummit, and are an example of a regional CPaaS provider. Twilio can not beat them in their home territory, relationships matter, only by buying Cequens would they disappear.

If you search Google for “Unified Communications” Sangoma is the first organic search.

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