The purpose of this CXTech Week 17 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.

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:

• Uniphore raises $400 million at a $2.5 billion valuation
• Commio launches its Partner Program
• Lumen Selects Alianza For Voice Services
• Replicant Raises $78M
• More DDoS for Mobile Messaging
• JT IoT (Stacuity’s partner) to Acquire NextM2M
• One Small Step in VR, just getting Clothes to look right
• BT and Toshiba test first commercial quantum-secure network
• April’s RTCSec Newsletter
• System Cards, a new resource for understanding how AI systems work
• 8k’s too early, there’s no content, and most can’t see it
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Uniphore raises $400 million at a $2.5 billion valuation

Last week we covered Uniphore’s acquisition of Colabo in CXTech Week 16 2022. This week Uniphore announced it had raised $400 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. It is the largest financing to date in call center AI, which involves utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to gauge content and sentiment in a customer’s speech, then provides customer service agents with live action suggestions or post-call analytics to review.

Uniphore was founded in 2008, incubating out of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, opened its Palo Alto, California headquarters in 2019. Over more than a decade, the company focused on its AI tools specifically on contact centers, or call centers, the common medium used by large businesses like airlines and banks to handle customer service.

They hope to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of its 2022 fiscal year, which ends April 30. Much of that comes from Uniphore’s success selling to enterprise clients: 15 customers pay more than $1 million a year, and three are spending more than $5 million. Uniphore makes about 70% of its money by selling to about 100 large companies including DHL and Priceline. Clearly they are delivering results in conversation AI.

Commio launches its Partner Program

This week Commio launched their Partner Program, enabling MSPs, integrators, VAR, etc. to add telephony and messaging to their offer. Really anyone serving mid-market enterprise and SaaS customers who need voice and text messaging in North America.

Their toll-free call routing technology works over all five domestic toll-free carriers. Tracking every call and optimizing carrier routing to deliver appropriate quality calls at the best price.

Because they connect with 40+ providers they can offer savings compared to Twilio or Bandwidth. Also the redundancy across the carriers provides better reliability. Across Teli and Thinq they also have a SMS API.

They have a fun piece on their CTO Evin Hunt, who I’ve known since his Shango days one decade ago.

Lumen Selects Alianza For Voice Services

For those who’ve been in the industry a while, all the name changes can leave you a little, “who are they?” Lumen are CenturyLink (Qwest, Embarq, Level 3, and a load of enterprise cloud tech and integrators). Alianza were founded in 2009 and provide managed voice to carriers (think voice without the IMS tax), they bought Counterpath in 2020 (CXTech Week 50 2020), and deliver UC as well as residential voice.

Lumen has launched Lumen Cloud Communications on the Alianza platform and will position it as a primary option for customers ready to migrate to a cloud communications solution. Together, Lumen and Alianza will be able to offer a robust migration path for customers on legacy voice services.

Alianza’s proprietary full-stack cloud communications platform will provide Lumen business customers with feature-rich voice, team messaging, video conferencing, mobile applications, and specialty lines — a POTS replacement solution for lines that support elevator phones, alarming, security systems, and remote access modems. It will also help accelerate Lumen’s journey to an advanced digital experience where customers can order, deploy, manage, and use their services online with a user-friendly administration portal.

My guess is Lumen had Broadsoft previously and the migration to Webex did not appeal, hence the move to Alianza.

Replicant Raises $78M

In the same category as Uniphore, Replicant, a Contact Center Automation company, raised $78M in Series B funding. Led by Stripes with participation from Salesforce Ventures, IronGrey, Omega Venture Partners, Norwest and Atomic.

Replicant’s platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues, without the wait, 24/7. This enables companies to automate their most common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges.

They’re earlier stage than Uniphore, those “15 customers pay more than $1 million a year, and three are spending more than $5 million” have a significant impact on valuation. Interestingly they size the customer care space $1.3 T.

More DDoS for Mobile Messaging

Mark Hay of Melrose Lab reported a DDoS attack on his CPaaS. Looks like they’re back! We covered the many DDoS attacks at TADSummit last year with a keynote from David Casem of Telnyx, and a presentation “The worst of enemies – let’s talk about DDoS and RTC” by Sandro Gauci. For TADSummit 2022 (website coming soon) as some of us will finally be face-to-face we’ll have a private session (not streamed, sorry) to share our experiences.

JT IoT (Stacuity’s partner) to Acquire NextM2M

We covered last week in CXTech Week 16 2022 Stacuity and JT IOT partnering to flesh out Stacuities MVP. This week JT IoT bought NextM2M. NextM2M’s business provides machine to machine data transmissions with a focus on custom-made solutions that aim to provide the most efficient SIM card option to meet specialised connectivity needs for more than 130 global customers in over 60 countries. The company partners with telecommunication providers such as Vodafone and JT, to power various IoT solutions, from smart sensors to industrial automation.

One Small Step in VR, just getting Clothes to look right

I wanted to highlight this development. My son plays Roblox, on Android or Chrome devices. He does not experience the discussion here. Basic games physics is the limit of the device he uses. But the work taking place here on clothing physics shows the steps towards more realistic online games / VR. I’m not going to mention the ‘M’ word as there’s simply too much BS at present.

What Roblox have worked out is creating an “abstraction layer” between the body and shirt meshes — introducing a new cage layer acting as an outer boundary of the underlying body structure, then interacting with the inner cage of the shirt getting layered on top of the body. Think of it simply as no longer does a shirt look like the body has been colored (think Lego). It looks like the body is wearing a shirt, and the body does not occasionally ‘poke through’ the shirt.

Small steps, but this is state of the art. Just getting a shirt or jacket to look like the character is wearing a shirt or jacket. And in the limit the end devices are the biggest determinant of experience, queue the Roblox refrain, “I’m lagging”.

So when you’re listening to someone with no VR / AR / gaming experience talk about the ‘M’ word as it it’s happening next year. Remember, we’re still struggling to get shirts to fit right.

BT and Toshiba test first commercial quantum-secure network

This is really a demo for EY to sell more services to its enterprise customers. BT and Toshiba launched the first commercial trial of a quantum-secured network on Wednesday April 27 that will block the vulnerabilities in encryption predicted to emerge once quantum computing becomes mainstream.

The network will be used by professional services group EY to connect two of its sites in London: one at London Bridge and the other at Canary Wharf. BT will provide the end-to-end encrypted links over its Openreach private fibre networks, while Toshiba is supplying the QKD hardware and key management software, the companies said.

Quantum computers are unreliable and costly today, but the technology offers the potential to crunch data millions of times faster than supercomputers.

We have an excellent review of Quantum Computing from Craig Richards, presented at TADSummit 2021. One of the limitations in QC is error rates. In this month’s Scientific American, Zaira Nazario, a quantum theorist at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, shared some insights. Using surface codes and a “heavy hex” layout— looks like the Settlers of Catan game board rather than a chessboard, see below. The article finished on the hill yet to climb in QC. I wish more articles in programmable communications would be as honest on the hill to climb, especially around bots and machine learning.

April’s RTCSec Newsletter

It’s now on my reading list.

• How OpenSSL’s CVE-2022-0778 is a problem in WebRTC environments
• Latest SIPVicious PRO news
• Various blog and news posts:
  • 3CX pre-auth RCE explanation
  • Open SIP relay abuse ITW
  • How LAPSUS$ probably abused VoIP
  • OpenSIPS’ new TCP module versus DoS attacks
  • Cisco Expressway and Telepresence VCS vulnerabilities
• A new tool to exploit STUN and TURN servers called stunner, from Firefart
• Advisories and vulnerabilities fixed (or not) in:
  • FreePBX
  • pjsip
  • Asterisk PBX
  • JunOS
  • WebRTC
  • Cisco Expressway and Telepresence VCS

System Cards, a new resource for understanding how AI systems work

Now that William King has joined Meta (reported last week CXTech Week 16 2022), my Linkedin feed has interesting articles about Facebook (Meta).

To help explain why your FB feed is what it is, FB is sharing a prototype AI System Card tool that is designed to provide insight into an AI system’s underlying architecture and help better explain how the AI operates. There are limits on what can be shared, as it can also help people game the system. It does set out at a high level how the algorithm works, most of which is already understood. However, the devil, as always, is in the details.

8k’s too early, there’s no content, and most can’t see it

Shipments of 8K TVs only accounted for 0.15% of all TV shipments in 2021. This translated to a little more than 350,000 units globally. It’s not a surprise, there’s no content. Japan does have a true 8k channel, one channel… And given the reality of most homes, 4k will be good enough, 8k is status / gamer terrority. Just like I’m never buying a Porsche as the price/value does not make sense for me. Why pay more for a difference you’ll not notice.

But what’s interesting is the revisions Omdia are making to their predictions given the downturn from the war in Ukraine. Expect to see further impact across many consumer discretionary items, including cars.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Bruno Coste is now MD Spain at PMP – Performance Management Partner. I’ve known Bruno since his time in Three UK, that’s nearly 20 years!

Ryan Daily added a role of program coordinator for Enterprise Connect, in addition to her role as associate editor.

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