The purpose of this CXTech Week 53 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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Once every 71 years we get a Week 53!

Every 71 years we get a 53rd week in a year. Corresponding to the Gregorian years that contain 53 Thursdays. Hence, I had to do a CXTech Week 53 News and Analysis, it’s the only time I’m going to get to do one in my life 🙂

Best Wishes for 2021!

2020 Review from the CXTech Newsletters

2020 was a busy year for programmable communications M&A, mostly consolidation, with a few potentially transforming the business as intelligence / insight around phone numbers / identifiers and the content of conversations becomes more relevant / useable and hence valuable. H1 2021 looks like this trend will continue.

There were some amazing results like Zoom’s MASSIVE quarter with 355% growth, CXTech Week 36. Most companies results were more mixed. So treat Zoom and Twilio as outliers: right place, right time, right broad market awareness.

In 2020 businesses could not put off upgrading their call centers or employee comms/collaboration. They had to act and act fast (in weeks) because of the pandemic, so it was done quick and dirty and not necessarily cheaply.

Through 2021/2022 comes the consolidation/rationalization of pandemic bandaids. Old call centers finally get replaced with the CCaaS / CPaaS overlaid as a bandaid to support remote working. The patchwork of legacy PBX/Zoom/SDWAN/SIP trunking/RingCentral/Slack/Microsoft Teams/Webex/CPaaS etc. gets rationalized. By the end of 2022 Programmable Communications will have jumped 10 years within 3 years. Enterprises usually move slowly, don’t fix what isn’t broken, but the pandemic changed that.

Voice will become more of a feature, part of a bundle. Conferencing using the PSTN will be considered ever more quaint, internet based collaboration will dominate. SMS, email, voice, web chat will remain the dominant customer communication methods. Social messaging will remain niche, publicly is not how most people want to communicate with brands.

Life will return to more or less normal by the end of 2021, dining at restaurants, attending events, spending time in each other’s homes sharing a meal (remember that!). People will forget through 2022 what the pandemic was like, just like we did with the Spanish Flu.

TADS 2021

TL;DR for TADS 2021

• TADSummit Asia 2021, online through May.
• TADHack Global 2021, hybrid (in-person and online) the weekend before Enterprise Connect on 25/26 September.
• TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021, hybrid (in-person and online) 10/11 November, Wednesday/Thursday.

At the moment, the main challenge is getting sponsors on board to make these events possible. We’ll be grateful for any help you can provide!

Communications is fundamental to the human condition. Now it is programmable, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible using it to improve people’s lives. Programmable Telecoms / Communications (CXTech) is a $1200B+ industry and TADS is the longest running series of global events focused on programmable telecoms / communications, since 2013.

TADSummit: the marketing in both the enterprise communications industry and the telecommunications industry is dominated by a few large organizations. TADSummit is the technology / business focused event that cuts through the corporate BS to help “raises the tide for all boats (small, medium and large businesses) in the industry,” with an explicitly stated no BS policy.

TADHack: is a global hackathon to raise global awareness and show what is possible using programmable communications / telecoms. Since its founding in 2014, TADHack has encouraged anyone interested to get involved, TADHack is for everyone! TADHack aims to “raise the tide for all boats in this programmable communications industry” and solve problems participants face in their home, work and community lives. You can see all we’ve achieved in the past 7 years in this video:

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Terry Hsiao has started a new position as Adjunct Professor at Marymount University. Previously he was with Kaleyra, that bought his SMS aggregator Hook Mobile. Back in the ’90s Terry was the founder CEO of Inphomatch / Mobile365, which was bought by Sysbase, then SAP, then Sinch.

Ishtiaq Ahmed is now Director Digital at Asiacell Communications PJSC in Iraq.

Amos Manasseh is now a Senior Entrepreneur In Residence at Mach49. I’ve known Amos since his time at Axiata Group.

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