CXTech Week 50 2020 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 50 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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Cisco buys imimobile

Great to see Cisco using the term CX, though my preference is CXTech than CXaaS, it’s a hybrid world 😉 I’ve know IMIMobile for a couple of decades, since founder / CEO Vishwanath Alluri ran the business out of Hyderabad.

IMI is primarily a business messaging provider, with a programmable communications platform, and fingers in quite a few different pies.

When Sinch bought SDI, that impacted some of their North America business.

It will be interesting to see how they avoid the same fate as Tropo in Cisco. The product fit with Webex Contact Center is clear. However, the much messier business messaging sales, and legacy aggregation / VAS deals across Asia and Africa will be challenging.

Alianza buys Counterpath

Alianza has agreed to acquire CounterPath in an all-cash transaction for US$3.49 per share an approximate market value of $25.7 million.

Last year we had a presentation from Todd Carothers, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at CounterPath on “End Point Evolution. Softphone Endpoint: From Product to API Driven Platform.

Counterpath is an existing Alianza partner, and with annual revenues of about $12M, hence Alianza is getting a good deal at 2.1X. The only issue is how this impacts some of Counterpath’s customers that are competitors of Alianza.

7 years of TADHack

Time flies! TADHack is 7 years old (2014-2020).

Save the date 25-26 September 2021 for TADHack Global 2021. We plan to be back in person for some locations by then, as well as hybrid/online.

Thank you to all our sponsors over the years including: VoIP Innovations, Simwood, Avaya, Sangoma, symbl.ai, Intelepeer, Asterisk, Apidaze, Nexmo, TeleSign, Flowroute, Github, Status, Zang, flowroute, telnyx, Cisco, DataArt, Dialogic, Telestax, Matrix, RingCentral, Temasys, Tropo, Vidyo, Google, Apifonica, Carrefour, Ubuntu, Canonical, hSenid Mobile, Voximplant, NTT, Skyway, Ericsson, Huawei, Ascion, Bandwidth, Intel, Truphone, UPM, IST, UCL, oracle, clarify, unify, Kandy, solaiemes, and many many more…

Some of the numbers include:

  • 7 TADHack Global
  • 11 TADHack-mini
  • 44+ countries including: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brasil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Zambia.
  • 100+ cities
  • 15,000+ Registrations
  • 1200+ pitches
  • $380k+ distributed in prize money
  • $150k in additional goodies and vouchers
  • 91 sponsors
  • 170+ partners including 18 Universities
  • 900+ YouTube videos with 3000+ hours of viewing, some videos have been viewed over 4000 times.
  • 12 companies founded
  • 100+ people we know helped with getting a great job.
  • 24 services launched into communities
  • People from ages 11 to 85 have taken part in TADHack!

Slices of TADSummit EMEA Americas 2020

After TADSummit in November we run a series of weblogs, A Slice of TADSummit, reviewing some of the important themes from TADSummit EMEA Americas 2020

A Slice of TADSummit: Cloud and Serverless

A Slice of TADSummit: Developers

A Slice of TADSummit: Telco Innovation

A Slice of TADSummit: Fraud and Security

A Slice of TADSummit: Open Source

A Slice of TADSummit: Customer Experience

A Slice of TADSummit: Innovators

A Slice of TADSummit: Potpourri

The next TADSummit will be TADSummit Asia 2021 Online through the month of May.

2020 IIT RTC Conference

  • The presentation videos are available as a YouTube playlist on the Illinois Tech YouTube channel.
  • You can also access the videos and the presentation slides via the Speaker page of the conference website. To access this content from the Speaker page, scroll to an individual presentation and click on the title, to display the presentation abstract. At the bottom of each abstract will be links to view both the presentation slides and the presentation videos.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to Martina Saric who is now Head of Innovation and Strategy at SEGRON. I’ve known Martina through her time in Magenta Telekom Austria.

Well done to Sacha Nacar who is now Acquisitions & Strategic Partnerships – Webex at Cisco. And a previous TADHack winner 🙂

Vincent Tang is now Senior Frontend Engineer at Oddball. Vincent runs the Code Chefs – Hungry Web Developer Podcast with German Gamboa. And both are winners at TADHack 🙂

Justin Dupree is now Vice President of Customer Success at Mapped

Luís Pedrosa is now Technical Lead at tru.ID. I’ve known Luís since his time at Nexmo.

Michael Ludden is now Chief Executive Officer at The Original Dog Treat Truck Company. Over the past decade he’s been an evangelist as HTC, Samsung, Google, IBM, and Bose.

Laurent Boucher is now Vice President Digital IT, Customer Relation Solutions and Global Architecture, Orange Labs Services at Orange

Justin Clark is now VP Global Alliances at Stealth Mode

Bjørn Andreas S. Wentzel is now Business Architect at Cisco.

Nizar Al Qabbani is now Customer Value Manager at Unifonic. Previously with Umniah.

Vik Verma is out of 8X8 and David Sipes (ex-RingCentral) is in.

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