The purpose of this CXTech Week 22 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.

Following advice, I’m including a small pitch for my consulting services in this newsletter, many readers are unaware I consult. I’m an Engineer who’s been independently consulting for a couple of decades, “I know stuff and people” 😉 Knowing stuff is important, there’s simply too much marketing BS being presented as analysis. Check out CPaaS Report: A Problem Large Analyst Firms need to Solve.

Covered this week:

• Announcing TADSummit 2022
• Please Register for the vCon Workshop Thursday June 9th
• CPaaS Report: A Problem Large Analyst Firms need to Solve
• Broadcom To Acquire VMware For $69 Billion
• T-Mobile Taps Dell’s Edge Computing for its 5G Advanced Network Solutions
• Nokia’s Cloud Native Communication Suite
• RTCSec Newsletter May 2022
• Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Announcing TADSummit 2022

Firstly, thank you to STROLID, Broadvoice / GoContact and AWA Network / Automat Berlin for sponsoring TADSummit 2022. Their support is critical for this event to take place.

TADSummit is the thought-leadership event in programmable communications for ten years. You can cut straight to the TADSummit 2022 agenda here, lots to add. And thank you to all the presenters who have already committed.

The physical event will be held on 8/9 November at GoContact’s offices in Rua das Cardadeiras Lugar, nº107, 3800-125 Aveiro, Portugal. Aveiro is referred to as the Venice of Portugal. And as always we’ll livestream for everyone online.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) Version of Agenda

• Welcome.
  • Welcome to Aveiro Portugal. João Camarate, CTO at Broadvoice & GoContact.
  • What happened since we last met? Where is the market going? Alan Quayle, independent
• Keynotes
  • Welcome to vCon! The next leap forward in the programmable communications industry. Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID
  • Founding a Startup in Telecoms. The good, the bad and the ugly. João Camarate, CTO at Broadvoice & GoContact.
  • Marten Schoenherr, CEO Automat Berlin/AWA Network/Founding Partner at TheWorkinGroup.
  • TBC from Global Telco
  • TBC from Programmable Comms Service Provider
  • TBC from Programmable Comms Enabler
• Conversation Intelligence
  • How to best maximize the conversation data stream for your business? Surbhi Rathore, CEO & Co-Founder, Symbl.ai
  • CPaaS Conversational Platforms and Conversational Customer Service – The Experience Gap? Paul Sweeney, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Webio
  • Master the Audience Experience Multiverse: AX Best Practices and Success Stories, Ken Herron, Chief Growth Officer, UIB
  • vCon Workshop. Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID, + many more contributors and implementors.
• Telco / Enterprise
  • UCaaS and telco integration. Global UCaaS/CCaaS/CPaaS
  • Reality of Programmable Communications in the Enterprise. Asia focused Programmable Communications Enabler
  • The Programmable Telco. Global Telco
  • Programmable Comms Case studies. Global Integrator
• Open Source
  • Programmable Collaboration on the Web. Dominique Hazael-Massieux, W3C
  • Jambonz Case Studies. Dave Horton
  • OpenSIPS Case Studies. Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, Founder and Developer at OpenSIPS Project
  • Architecting your WebRTC application for scalability, Arin Sime and Alberto González Trastoy.
  • Open Source Telecom Software Survey Results. Alan Quayle, independent
• Security and Protection
  • How to bring down your own RTC platform. Running DDoS simulations on your own. Sandro Gauci, CEO / Senior Penetration Tester / Chief mischief officer at Enable Security
  • Identity Innovations thank to Programmable Communications. Guillaume Bourcy, Products & Data Science at TeleSign.
  • What Everyone Needs to Know about Protecting the CPaaS Ecosystem from Unlawful Robocalls. Gerry Christensen, VP YouMail.
  • DDoS Workshop. Private session facilitated by Sandro Gauci and Alan Quayle.
• IoT
  • eSIM Reality. Craig Richards, Chief Operating OfficerChief Operating Officer, 10T Tech
  • Time to ditch the ‘dumb-pipe’ – reinventing the core mobile network, to put developers first. Mike Bromwich, CEO / Co-Founder Stacuity & Tim Dowling, Co-Founder Stacuity
• TADHack
  • Review of TADHack Global winners from all the TADHack sponsors
• Investors
  • Advice from Mark White, Corum

Please Register for the vCon Workshop Thursday June 9th

vCon is an open standard for conversation data. In December 2021 Thomas Howe, CTO of STROLID, introduced vCon. Check out the vCon github repository and get involved, it’s open to everyone.

Sharing conversation data is a significant problem faced by programmable communications developers today. vCon makes working with conversations easier, hence the addressable market of developers expands ten thousand fold across web and enterprise developers. This happened one decade ago when telecoms became easy to use with simple web-centric APIs from CPaaS. This will happen again for conversations thanks to vCon. 

An innovation ecosystem of specialists in conversation intelligence will flourish solving specific business pain points across operations, compliance, privacy, security, ethics, etc. Think of vCon as ‘robot food’, enabling conversation data to be presented in a common format and more easily cleaned for training of machine learning. ASR and conversation AI solutions do not meet the needs of some businesses with respect to accuracy, vCon will help our industry close the gap with respect to the hype.

Through the creation of a common unit of exchange and openness, industries have been transformed. Global trade in the 50 years from 1967 to 2017 went from 22% to roughly 60% of global GDP thanks to containers. SMS in 5 years grew 3000%, and created multi-tens of billion dollar industries across CPaaS and A2P SMS. Open banking in the UK became ubiquitous in 4 years.

vCon will do the same. Conversations currently trapped in silos of communication platforms or simply stored in the company’s data lake will become common units, where innovators will create new value, solve business problems, and deliver valuable insights because their business lives/dies on delivering that. vCon is the next leap forward in the programmable communications industry.

On Thursday June 9th at 11AM ET / 8AM PT / 4PM UK / 5PM CET we plan to run a vCon Workshop. Register here. The agenda will be:

• Welcome and Intro from Thomas (10 mins)
• vCon Walkthrough from Dan and Thomas (15 mins)
• Use Cases, Analogies, Strategic Importance, Plans (10 mins)
• Call to Action: Please provide feedback and become a contributor.
• Q&A

STROLID will be sponsoring both TADHack and TADSummit. At TADHack developers will be able to build cool stuff using conversation data. And at TADSummit we’ll have both a vCon keynote from Thomas and workshop to understand the latest and steer vCon’s direction.

CPaaS Report: A Problem Large Analyst Firms need to Solve

Before I begin; I have great respect for Pamela Clark-Dickson, we’ve known each other for well over a decade, she knows the programmable communications industry better than any other analyst I know. The report “Omdia Universe: CPaaS Platform Providers, 2022–23” is simply doing what the customer wants, marketing collateral. She’s doing her job. But the report is wrong.

(UPDATE: I talked with Pamela last night (she’s based in Australia) and it turns out Vonage did not commission this specific report, rather has been heavily promoting it. I changed this article to better reflect the situation. I consider this report to be biased towards marketing collateral given the issues identified.)

Why is Vonage promoting this report? To help justify the acquisition by Ericsson. I reviewed the acquisition here https://alanquayle.com/2021/11/cxtech-week-47-2021/. Investors forced action.

I recommend reviewing this simple programmable communications model, https://alanquayle.com/2021/02/programmable-communications-model/. It will help you understand better the structure of the programmable communications industry.

Syniverse (aggregator) is a supplier to Twilio (applications of which CPaaS is one), they are not CPaaS competitors, the overlap is slight. Twilio recently invested $750M in Syniverse, they wouldn’t do that if they were direct CPaaS competitors, https://alanquayle.com/2022/05/cxtech-week-20-2022/. The weblog covers other issues with the report and highlights the problem in positioning marketing collateral as an analyst report.

Broadcom To Acquire VMware For $69 Billion

This is one of the largest tech M&As in history. I remember when Broadcom bought CA Technologies, I was surprised. However, the CA Technologies acquisition seems to have worked out OK, growth continues, if anything a little fastest than before, 7% rather than 6%. I always thought of CA Technologies as an old-age care home for software. Mainframe software remains a big piece of its business. I was a little sad when CA bought Layer 7, but the business ticks over, not on the same trajectory as Apigee/Google, but growing.

VMWare has lots of government and financial services customers, that also have mainframes, perhaps there’s more synergy under the hood of their customers. VMware revenue growth is about 9%, a little faster than CA.

Unlike Intel, which also has a massive software business and a strong hardware-centric culture. Broadcom as left CA to its own devices. Perhaps this could work, no 30% growth and synergy miracles. Just an $18B pa enterprise infrastructure software business generating a solid return, managing those processes and boxes in the corner of the data center that no one dare touch in case they break something. Telco is not the only industry where legacy means decades old processes and technologies.

T-Mobile Taps Dell’s Edge Computing for its 5G Advanced Network Solutions

The US has no home-grown strategic mobile telecom network infrastructure provider since Nokia took over Alcatel Lucent. Perhaps this is the first steps towards the emergence of a new home grown vendor with Dell? They position across 5G and are popping up in lots of industry 5G initiatives. As RAN becomes more software defined, it may not be that big a leap for Dell.

T-Mobile’s 5G Private Mobile Network will be combined with Dell’s edge computing technologies. This gives enterprises the superfast speeds, ultra-low latency, and control they need to use new applications that can help to increase revenue and lower costs.

T-Mobile’s 5G Private Mobile Network will pair a private 5G network with Dell edge computing technologies, including Dell VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure, so data can be processed, stored and acted upon locally at locations like large business campuses, factories, or universities.

Nokia’s Cloud Native Communication Suite

I saw this and smiled, IMS in a box, well a container. All that complexity to create a multi-vendor, multi-QoS, multimedia application server, and you can now buy it as a bundle. I wonder if some one is looking at FreeSWITCH in a container, it has a great ecosystem of services, and slap some diameter handlers (fixed) and mobility management (mobile) on it for talking to the rest of the telco stack 😉 Perhaps ng-voice?

RTCSec Newsletter May 2022

Always a good round-up of the RTC Security news from Sandro.

The snippet that caught my attention was: video calling applications sometimes ignore mute. It turns out that that mute button on your favorite video conferencing app may not do what you would expect it to do! For example, Webex continuously reads audio data from the microphone and transmits statistics of that data once per minute to its telemetry servers. Which isn’t that bad.

Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report

This is an excellent report, well worth reviewing all the breach statistics. DDoS is my focus, because of its impact on RTC. At TADSummit 2022 we have a workshop and presentation focused on DDoS.

I picked out a few of the data points below, DDoS makes up the lion’s share of the incidents, but breaches are rare. Rather its about cutting off service and demanding a ransom. Profession services is the top industry targeted, following by IT which includes cloud and telecom AFAIK. Most attacks are short duration, a few hours at most. While we’ve seen attacks on some CPaaS go on for days. And the volume of the attacks continues to grow, showing its mainly volumetric attacks.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Stefan Ćuković is now Senior Director of Messaging Operations at Telesign. (Yeah, I do not need to capitalize the S)

James Tagg is now Chief Architect at World Mobile Group.

Karl Perkins is now Chief Innovation Officer at Bandwidth.

Seckin Yazan is now head of Product at epay, a Euronet Worldwide Company.

John Puma is now Sr Product Manager – Private 5G Solutions at Dish.

Robby Dyer is is now Staff DevOps Engineer at Chegg. I’ve known Robby since his Tropo days.

Simon West is now Chief Experience Officer at Beep.

A close escape from a cesspit!

Over the Memorial Day weekend I was mowing the lawn and notice a bit of subsidence. I finished mowing around the dip, popped inside to search on the ‘net about ways to deal with lawn subsidence. And when I came back out a few minutes later it was a 10ft deep hole.

Turns out it’s an old cesspit, built in ’57 when the house was built, and abandoned when the municipal sewer came through in ’60. Cesspits do not show up on site surveys, nor when there’s an oil tank search as its concrete, no metal. Death by cesspit is surprisingly common, a lucky escape.

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