CXTech Week 49 2021 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 49 2021 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.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.

Covered this week:

  • Genesys raises $580M on $21B Valuation from Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce.com
  • William King at CommCon Tomorrow (9th Dec) on Subspace Deepdive
  • TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE
  • MITTO: The security risks around SS7 access came up again.
  • NPR: Criminal hackers are now going after phone lines
  • TADSummit EMEA Americas is almost Wrapped Up
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Genesys raises $580M on $21B Valuation from Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce.com

We kicked off the GoContact Keynote at TADSummit with a hot topic question, the Genesys investment, of $580M by Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, etc.

Shai Berger, Fonolo, pointed out that Genesys today is changing. It’s not the old call center company, with an new management team, and the successful integration of Interactive Intelligence. This has resulted in the company’s cloud and subscription bookings, which make up more than 90% of total new bookings, growing more than 100% year-over-year in the first half of fiscal year 2022.

Thomas Howe, STROLID, pointed out that the investment neuters competition. This is similar to how Twilio has invested in Syniverse, a competitor to Sinch. The call center is not going away, it will remain a dominant part of many customer experience use cases. So for Salesforce, Zoom, ServiceNow, it enables them to have a stake in a core part of the customer experience landscape, without the distraction such a large established business brings.

The size of the investment shows we’re going to see some interesting M&A in the coming months. João Camarate, GoContact, pointed out this is a growing trend of investing the a large player, like Sinch, and letting them execute the M&A and integration. You can see the discussion here:

William King at CommCon Tomorrow (9th Dec) on Subspace Deepdive

William King, CTO of Subspace, is taking a deep dive into Subspaces’ technology at CommCon this Thursday, December 9, at 11:00am Pacific (19:00 UTC). 

In this session, William will expand on the more general overview, and delve into some of the BGP routing and other low-level technologies that power the Subspace Network. Set your calendar and join William’s session HERE!

TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE

This weekend keep an eye on TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE. There’s still time to register.

The security risks around SS7 access came up again.

A Bloomberg News investigation, carried out in collaboration with the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, indicates that the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Ilja Gorelik, was also providing another service: selling access to Mitto’s networks to secretly locate people via their mobile phones.

In at least one instance, a phone number associated with a senior U.S. State Department official was targeted in 2019 for surveillance through the use of Mitto’s systems, according to a cybersecurity analyst familiar with the incident and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

This story looks like it’s going to run…

Criminal hackers are now going after phone lines

It’s great to see both Fred Posner and Sandro Gauci quoted in this article. Sandro did a great presentation on this topic, The worst of enemies – let’s talk about DDoS and RTC .

Today, David Casem of Telnyx gave an excellent review of their DDoS experiences. Because of security reasons we can not publicly share the presentation, you can ask and we can share it privately with Telnyx approval.

TADSummit EMEA Americas is almost Wrapped Up

This week we had live keynotes, it was fun to chat in real-time, you can see by the smiles on everyone’s face. You can see the sessions below are covering critical areas in the evolution of programmable communications.

We have one more session from Sebastian Schumann on “Intermediate Reflections on a Telco’s journey towards programmable communications.” If you chat with Sebastian, don’t forget to remind him we’re waiting on his presentation 😉

GoContact Keynote Panel Discussion: The Challenges and Opportunities of merging UCaaS and CCaaS.

> Link to slides, video, summary and Q&A <

  • João Camarate, CTO Broadvoice and GoContact.
  • Shai Berger, CEO Fonolo
  • Adnan Saleem, CTO Software and Cloud Solutions, Radisys
  • Al Balasco, SVP Communications Solutions, Radisys
  • Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID
  • Alan Quayle, Independent
  • Let’s get this one out of the way first, what do you think of the Genesys investment by Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, etc. $580 Million investment at $21 Billion valuation?
  • What customer need is driving the current UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS consolidation?
  • Let’s review what’s going on in the market at the moment, it’s busy! Five9 and Zoom, Fuze and 8X8, broadvoice and GoContact, Serenova and Lifesize, Dialpad and Highfive, Talkdesk building out its UC product, Vonage and NVM etc. Why did some work, others receive a cool reception from the market, while others appear to be just good old product development?
  • The buyers for UCaaS and CCaaS have historically been different. They are solving different problems, employee communications and customer communications. They have a common core technology, the telcom app server. But does merging UCaaS and CCaaS really make sense?
  • Focusing on the technology of merging UCaaS and CCaaS, what are the pros and cons?
  • What market segments, or what regions, or what go-to-markets will deliver the results of this merger?
  • Some of the M&A has been video focused. Video is significant in employee collaboration, however, in customer communication it still appears niche. Is video going to make the leap into mainstream customer communications anytime soon?

Radisys Keynote: How Programmable Digital Engagement Can Evolve Customer Experience Past Voice & Messaging

> Link to slides, video, summary and Q&A <

Adnan Saleem, CTO – Software and Cloud Solutions, Radisys; and Al Balasco, SVP Communications Solutions, Radisys.

Today’s digitally powered economy is set to take off. By leveraging the high-bandwidth, low-latency network services, operators use APIs to expose their network services, allowing a vast community of new mobile and web application developers to create new experiences without telephony communications infrastructure expertise. With the rapid advances in fixed and wireless networks, such as 5G, service providers are in a position to leverage this new programmable communications paradigm to facilitate a new wave of innovation in immersive real-time communications, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Media Analytics, and Edge Computing applications.

Radisys enables a range of new digital engagement applications that can help service providers innovate and increase revenue. Rather than relying on just voice-first capabilities, service providers powered by Radisys Engage can open their networks to the innovation of programmable AI, Speech Analytics, and Computer Vision and create unique applications that will attract and retain consumers and businesses.

You will learn:

  • How conversational AI-based Video Virtual Assistants to automate customer engagement
  • How conversational in-call assistants can performs biometric authentication, reduce background noise on live calls, and more
  • How to use virtual assistants for hyper-personalized digital commerce in AR/VR applications

AWA Keynote. The AWA Story. Liberating a growing market.

> Link to slides, video, summary and Q&A <

Marten Schoenherr, CEO and Founder, AWA Network

The Problem:
Vendor lock in with CPaaS
Black-box conditions
Missing features

The Solution:
Universal API
Real-time routing on a list of integrated providers
Enrich universal API with user preferences not available from the usual suspect CPaaS

Telnyx Keynote

Topic: DDOS, David Casem, CEO Telnyx.

<For security reasons video is being kept private, please ask if you’d like to view the video.>

STROLID Keynote, vCons: A Proposal for an Open Standard for Conversation Data

> Link to slides, video, summary and Q&A <

Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID

  • From Voice to Everything: How conversations have changed in the past 100 years
  • Elements of Conversations: Messaging, voice, participants
  • Gathering the Conversation: A single container for a conversation
  • Conversations as Data: Using conversations for analysis, collaboration and decision making
  • Call to Action: Workgroup on Defining Conversations

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Ravish Patel is now Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Monnai.

Pierre Demarche is now Co-Founder & CEO at Monnai, disrupting Fintech decisioning. They were previously with TeleSign, and part of the loss of talent when Proximus bought BICS/TeleSign.

Nicolas Calderon is now CX Evangelist at Voximplant, and is a winner at TADHack Global 2021.

Manjit Waters is now Head of Doing at Criss Cross.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email.