CXTech Week 47 2022 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 47 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:

  • TADSummit 2022 Review
  • Ericsson plans to turn Vonage into a 5G app powerhouse
  • Britain bids farewell to fax
  • Mavenir launches CPaaS for CSPs
  • Interesting Data on Phone Scams
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADSummit 2020 Review

Being in-person for a no-BS share on the latest in programmable communications / telecoms was a delight. Thank you to STROLIDBroadvoice / GoContactRadisysRingCentralStacuity, and AWA Network / Automat Berlin for sponsoring TADSummit 2022. Their support is critical for this event to take place. And thank you to all the presenters and attendees in making the event excellent.

Here’s the content:

And here are a few posts from the event:

Ericsson plans to turn Vonage into a 5G app powerhouse

The key quote from the article is “Ericsson believes it can come up with that standard interface for 5G application development by tweaking Vonage’s communications platform and using it to create a suite of network functions with open APIs. Developers would then be able to use the platform to more easily create applications.”

I understand the need for a standard air interface for 5G, so equipment manufacturers can build to it and the devices work around the world. But for applications there’s no need for a standard. The rest of the programmable communications business works fine with simple, easy to use APIs and SDKs. The failure of the GSMA’s OneAPI showed there’s no need for a standard, the whole telecoms industry failed to engage developers with OneAPI. Ericsson needs to learn this important lesson from history, forget about standard APIs. Just make them easy to use and relevant.

APAC is the where Nexmo’s vision (bought by Vonage) of an integrated CPaaS from direct carrier interconnect (aggregation), exposing easy to use SMS APIs, through to enterprise applications was fully realized. The cognitive dissonance the APAC team must face when told to sell standard 5G APIs, private 5G, and 5G applications to their enterprises must be painful.

Ericsson should not have bought a telco, that’s what Vonage is when measured by revenue. But now it has, how best to make money with the asset?

Telcos are struggling in the enterprise market. One option is to resell a market leader like RingCentral, a sponsor of TADSummit. Another option is to use open source and deliver a value-bundle to SMB (Small Medium Enterprise). Again we’ve reviewed that option at TADSummit over the years.

But what about the mid-market? These customers need pre-integrations and workflows, but are more price sensitive than large enterprise. RingCentral could be extended from large enterprise.

Another option is to white-label Vonage’s programmable communications platform from Ericsson so the carrier’s brand remains customer-forward with a modern, programmable, broad, and integrated suite of enterprise communication services. Forget about standard 5G APIs, its niche. Focus on the core Vonage offer, enterprise communications, and enabling carriers to remain relevant so a segment of their customers.

Britain bids farewell to fax

The UK regulator has proposed updating the USO (Universal Service Obligation), a set of rules that ensures everyone in the UK has access to telecommunication services, to remove the requirement for telecommunications companies to provide facsimile machine connections.

At the moment, BT and KCOM are the two designated telecom providers responsible for universal service in the UK, meaning they are legally obliged to ensure the existence of an affordable national telephone and fax service across the UK.

Surprisingly, a freedom of information request in 2020 by eFax found that there were almost 1,000 fax machines still in use across local councils, police forces, universities and fire services. And more than 800 fax machines were still being used by the NHS, as of August 2022.

Cloud fax providers have had to develop an infrastructure that guarantees business users the most secure, private, and legally compliant way to transmit their confidential data to clients, vendors, partners, and other third parties. This is why the fax will remain at the heart of many business processes. Fax is dead! Long live the fax!

Here’s a great review of fax from Howard Avner in 2019 at TADSummit Americas.

Mavenir launches CPaaS for CSPs

Based in part of its Telestax acquisition, Mavenir has launched it CPaaS for CSPs as a SaaS offer, managed and operated by Mavenir in the public cloud and offered in a pay-as-you-grow model that minimizes upfront investments and risks, accelerating time to market.

Its interesting to compare and contrast this with Radisys EDP (Engage Digital Platform), presented at TADSummit and had a storming TADHack with 23 hacks listed below. While Mavenir focuses on rehashing old acronyms, Radisys focuses on making it easy for developers. In the limit the market will decide. Let’s see which approach makes telcos successful.

The Radisys Winners are:

  • Top prize of $3500 goes to Field Workforce Helper by Nacho Garmilla using Radisys. Field Workforce Helper: Provides information from the inventory to support field workforce tasks, and routes Guard calls to the guard operator using an agenda in a google spreadsheet. It also logs in the spreadsheet call information.
  • Second place prize of $2500 goes to Similarly Geeky (Steev Goodwin & Lily Madar) with Secret Babble helps making multilingual conversations more accessible by providing translations over the phone which can be read out loud by the system or sent discreetly as text message only, providing a transcription of the exchange.
  • Joint third place prize of $1500 goes to Blink by Linda Mosemaka. Blink is an application that is created to be used in crowded places to reduce the crowd and give people easy access to information about that particular place. A South African remote winner!!!
  • Joint third place prize of $1500 goes to live connect by John Lyons. Live Connect lets you connect to the experts from around the world. Whether you are interested in learning a new language, finding a maths tutor for your kids, music lessons, golf swing help, or anything, live connect brings the trainer into your home. We use the radisys API to connect via Video to your computer or your phone. Use your website to find a suitable expert, book out the time slot with them, then get connect.
  • Best Industry 4.0 Hack prize of $1000 went to Team RegeX with FiremX– Fire detection system.
  • Best Disruptive Digital Engagement Hack of $1000 went to LifeVerse by Fahad Mahmood , Sarmad Faheem, and Faheem Azhar. Lifeverse is a health metaverse and real-time engagement platform. People can visit clinics, book appointments using clinic IVR or by interacting with staff members and consult with health specialists through a single platform.

Interesting Data on Phone Scams

According to Bankwest the top ten scams by volume were:

  • Threat and Penalty: 590 cases (23%)
  • Remote access: 584 (22%)
  • IT/Technology: 410 (16%)
  • Job/Investment: 391 (15%)
  • Relationship: 297 (11%)
  • Unexpected money: 97 (4%)
  • Remote Access/IT (split into three categories): 88 (3%)
  • Buying/Selling: 74 (3%)
  • Business email compromise: 70 (3%)
  • Retail email compromise: 16 (1%).

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Tony Martindale is now Sales Manager at Cogito Group Pty Ltd. I’ve known Tony since his time at OpenCloud, which is now part of Metaswitch.

Vanessa Silva is now Engineering Director at Aircall. She also attended TADSummit 2022 🙂

Darshana Perera is now a Trainee UI/UX Engineer at hSenid Mobile Solutions

Adnan Agboatwalla is now Director of Product Management – Duo Security at Cisco,

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