The purpose of this CXTech Week 1 2022 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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Covered this week:

• 2021 Review from the CXTech Newsletters
• Symbl.ai Thanks their Developers
• Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff – lots of people moves this week, the start of a new year. Always interesting as it both heralds and confirms, big and small changes in the industry. From confirming the dominance of Google in RCS (for Android) to the inevitability of wider open source adoption by telcos.

2021 Review from the CXTech Newsletters

I know this article is too long, it provides a round-up of the main programmable communications headlines through 2021. It’s been another busy year.

Identity verification keeps getting hotter and could enter a phase of industry convergence in 2022 between enterprise / web and programmable communications industries. We’re already seeing similar convergence from the cloud infrastructure providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google who are slowly and steadily moving into the telco core, as well as building out their programmable communications platforms. They understand the importance of open source and owning your product / roadmap to be competitive in today’s market.

Aggregation of the aggregators. Lots of M&A across SMS, voice, and channels to enterprises, the battle lines are being drawn. The work of AVA Network, a TADHack and TADSummit sponsor, is an interesting play given this consolidation.

Symbl.ai Thanks their Developers

Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS

NoJitter tends to give the establishment view of the world on most topics, i.e. what favors the big established vendors. At TADSummit last month we had an excellent keynote panel sponsored by GoContact on this topic, The Challenges and Opportunities of merging UCaaS and CCaaS. Check it out for a no BS view of what is really happening beyond the establishment view.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Izabella Coeli is now Senior Telco Solutions Architect at Red Hat. Red Hat were a sponsor of TADHack-mini Orlando at AVaya ENGAGE in Dec. Previously Izabella was with AWS, and before that Ericsson.

Lokdeep Singh is now EVP and Chief Product Development officer at Talkwalker, consumer intelligence. Previously with Synchronoss, leading their messaging business. Given the US carriers have fallen into line with Google, that likely limited the role Synchronoss could play. However, Synchronoss had a proven and relatively successful solution in Japan for RCS.

Alex Doyle is now Vice President Product Management, Verizon Business Group at Verizon.

Erin Chan is now a Sales Engineer at Vonage.

Chad Kinlay is now CMO at TrafficGuard. Previously with Epsilon Telecommunications, a TADSummit presenter, that was bought last year by KT, CXTech Week 37 2021.

Shang Wu is now Go to Market Specialist – Hybrid Cloud (RHEL) at Red Hat. We first met during his time at Canonical, a TADHack and TADSummit sponsor.

Eddie DeCurtis is now Vice President Of Global Business Development – Enterprise Connect at Mavenir. Previously LivePerson and before that tyntec, both of which are TADSummit sponsors / supporters.

Altug Pekin is now Senior Sales Executive at Oracle. Previously he was with Huawei, where we met at TADSummit 2014, which was in Istanbul.

Will Yapp is now EVP Sales & Business Development at Right Networks.

Todd Wallace is now VP of Telecom at LiveVox.

Guy Almog is now Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). We first met during his Amdocs days.

Andy Abramson has an additional position as Global Head, Marketing and Communications at AEHRA

Soliman ElSaber is now Data Engineer at AirAsia. He took part is several TADHacks.

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