The purpose of this CXTech Week 36 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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WOW, just WOW! Zoom’s quarterly revenue was $663.5 million, up 355%, ahead of an analyst consensus of $500 million.

“Organizations are shifting from addressing their immediate business continuity needs to supporting a future of working anywhere, learning anywhere, and connecting anywhere on Zoom,” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

Year to date Zoom stock is up 560%. For the full fiscal year, Zoom raised its guidance to between $2.37 billion and $2.39 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 281% to 284%. Its prior full-year sales guidance, issued in its first-quarter earnings release, was between $1.775 and $1.8 billion. And its likely to achieve those numbers. However, moving into H2 2021 I think there will be softness.

Most businesses and schools I know are still operating hybrid, both in-person and remote. Schools will likely move away from Zoom once kids are back in school full time by the middle of next year. Most teachers and students tolerate video conferencing, but are not fans of online learning for class room settings because of constant technical and operational issues. For self-directed study, like Google’s CSFirst, online is excellent. But you do not need Zoom or Google Meet for that.

For businesses, the return to work will be interesting, many smaller businesses I know are back working fulltime in-person in NJ. They still use video conferencing for meetings with other businesses, as it’s simply easier than getting everyone into a meeting room. Just less internal use.

Larger organizations are making extensive use of lawyers as people try to remain remote as big corporations try to bring them back into the office. How this plays out is yet to be seen. From a straw poll of people I know in my neighborhood (mostly NYC commuting professionals), about half want to get back to the office and away from their home (kids). The other half are happy remote but would like more flexibility for WFH. Rather than POETS Day (P!ss Off Early iTS friDay); Mondays and sometime during the week every other week seems to be the preference.

For the later half of the people in the straw poll, a driver is not just convenience and more time in their lives. They’ve realized how much they’ve missed in their children’s development by working from home rather than commuting and in the office for 12 hours a day. Previously relying on nannies and teachers, who often know their children’s’ likes and dislikes better than them. Parents do not necessarily want to lose the connection with their children they’ve built by working from home.

In summary, the enterprise numbers are not going to significantly change for Zoom, but the education and personal use will. I already see people using Google Meet in preference to Zoom, given the limitations of Zoom’s free service, and people starting to move off paid Zoom onto Google Meet. The growth of Zoom’s UC business and corporate video conferencing room and interoperability will be important in avoiding a revenue dip.

OPENSIPS SUMMIT DISTRIBUTED 2020, 7-11 Sept

I’ll be giving a presentation on “Open Source Telecom Software Status, Trends, and the Road Ahead” on Tuesday 8th Sept at 15:00-16:00 GMT.

Dialpad Acquires Video Conferencing Service Highfive

This one surprised me, Dialpad has a video conferencing service, and has solid WebRTC competence. I thought the deal was one of those investor instigated deals as they roll-up parts of their portfolio to achieve better scale as the enterprise communications market matures.

The gap Highfive fills with competing UC offers is in video interop and conferencing room systems. We’ve seen Zoom making such moves over the past year.

I’m not sure how much business Dialpad lost through this gap. The UCaaS deal is a winner takes all, while the collaboration deal can be done division by division. Many corporations I know have one UC vendor and multiple collaboration vendors. For example, Sales uses a different collaboration tools to Development.

Video is fashionable, and investors assiduously follow fashion. While the immediate benefits are not that obvious to me. If seamless video collaboration with conference rooms and across systems becomes a significant criteria, Dialpad is well placed. I’m not yet convinced video collaboration will become a winner takes all decision.

Why Companies Cannot Innovate & Why They Will Keep Failing. Unless They End-Run Themselves

A great article that aligns with My View on the “Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena” Paper.

Quoting from the article: “When do you know you’re in trouble? And if there’s no immediate evidence you are, why change anything until you know for sure? Even tougher, how do you estimate how many years you have left to harvest? Proactive disruptive innovation is almost impossible – the second reason why companies fail to innovate. Finally, disruptive innovation severely challenges existing structures, protocols and ways-of-working. “

In this weblog “From IM to the First Point of Contact with the Internet (FPOCI)” I talked about how to end-run on RCS.

Fernando is back at TADSummit, yeah!

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to Tera Hudson who is now Sr. Marketing Manager, Demand Generation at The Mom Project. A talent marketplace and community that connects professionally accomplished women with world-class companies.

Well done to Uros Mijatovic for being promoted to VP, Messaging Solutions at TeleSign.

Eric Doyle if now Senior Director, Marketing & Communications at Apifiny.

Suchita Kaundin is also now a Founding Partner at Unicorn VC.

Yuri Viviana is now Ingeniera de software at Bancolombia. Yuri helped us in the early day of TADHack Popayán.

Matthias Nass is now Managing Director at Fiber To The People GmbH.

Micaela Giuhat is now a Director at Microsoft, after the acquisition of Metaswitch by Microsoft.

Yvan Delègue is now Director, digital innovation program for Africa at Orange.

Ir Ts Azizi is now Chief Operating Officer at Telekom Malaysia.

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