The purpose of this CXTech Week 5 2024 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:

• Podcast 30: Truth in Telecoms: Flipping the Bird with Robert Vis
• Cloud Communications Alliance AND Technology Reseller Podcasts on TADHack Open
• Dutch software firm MessageBird rebrands as Bird, slashes prices
• FBI Director Christopher Wray warns on threat that Chinese hackers pose to critical infrastructure
• Verizon switching to Google’s Jibe – the die is cast on the future of US messaging
• CPaaS is dumba$$
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Podcast 30: Truth in Telecoms: Flipping the Bird with Robert Vis

We were planning on bringing guests on soon, and when Robert Vis joined our conversation on Linkedin about renaming MessageBird to Bird, potentially taking over Twilio, and dropping SMS margins by 90%. Well, the opportunity presented itself. You can see below the impact Robert had on the market yesterday. Thanks to Mark Hay for the image

Using the British idiom, Robert certainly “put a cat amongst the pigeons!” See below the impact of Robert’s announcement on Sinch and Link. . Robert is very much a kindred spirit of the Truth in Telecoms Podcast, so much so, Johnny adopted him during the podcast 🙂

Robert is not able to talk about Twilio, for obvious reasons; however, Johnny more than made up for that. Reviewing the $280M Twilio is spending on sales and marketing per quarter, making the path to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) profitability challenging. Hence Bird could make a bid for Twilio once Wall Street understood this situation. But why would Bird want to buy that? Regardless, it attracts attention to Bird’s IPO and differentiates it from the rest of the pack.

Robert’s vision is to disrupt the tired old CPaaS business by delivering business solutions that integrate the channel and customer data. I couldn’t agree more when he said “CPaaS is dead,” and the “omnichannel lie of CPaaS – its different platforms”.

Bird has re-engineered its platform, focusing on delivering solutions to business problems, and charging on the value delivered, not per SMS, SMS will be at cost. For example, at point of sale in enabling a business to both transact (accept customer payment) and know the customer performing that transaction. Obvious stuff, but for an industry focused on monetizing APIs for SMS, voice, RCS, IP Messaging; it’s a highly disruptive to move away from how they’ve made money over the past decade.

We discussed the critical juncture the SMS business has reached, analogous to the calling card industry 15 years ago. Fraud and scams are killing the industry, the industry is complicit, and has become dependent on the revenue from it, for example AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic). Bird is disrupting the industry, breaking from the CPaaS legacy, and focusing on delivering business solutions built on programmable communications.

We outro with a video from TNID showing the importance of Self Sovereign Identity in protecting your online data.

Cloud Communications Alliance AND Technology Reseller Podcasts on TADHack Open

Thank you to the Cloud Communications Alliance and Joe Marion for promoting TADHack Open, the weekend before Enterprise Connect 2024.

TADHack enables developers (hack) and innovators (showcase) to share ideas on using the TADHack sponsors’ technologies (STROLID with vCon) and to be announced next week new sponsor SignalWire. A showcase is simply a short presentation of an idea about how you can use the sponsors’ technologies in your business.

Check out the title link for the podcast video, or you can access the video directly from this link. Thank you Doug Green and Technology Reseller News for creating this podcast. And if that was not enough Technology Reseller also put us on their podcast.

Dutch software firm MessageBird rebrands as Bird, slashes prices

Bird registered EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, of around 80 million euros ($87 million)in 2023. The company is weighing an IPO on the Euronext stock exchange in 2024 or 2025.

FBI Director Christopher Wray warns on threat that Chinese hackers pose to critical infrastructure

Rick Joyce raised this concern last year, pointing this out that China is in the critical national infrastructure of The Campaign Registry.

I’ve covered his work here:
1) The Campaign Registry and Foreign Ownership: A Matter of National Security
2) and his FCC filing (if you have problems with the FCC link try this one)

It’s a shame more people did not take note. I found some of the mobile industry’s commentary on Rick’s letter not just wrong but insulting. I wonder if they’ll apologise?

Verizon switching to Google’s Jibe – the die is cast on the future of US messaging

I remember advising a client 6 years ago that even if they did win Verizon; Verizon would inevitably migrate to Google. Well, it happened.

Google offers “Jibe Cloud” to let carriers “easily launch and manage RCS services with Google-hosted infrastructure.” The other aspect is a “Jibe Hub” that allows interoperability between third-party RCS networks.

They also offer slick RBM ingestion. And while they’re running RCS, why not stop paying for all that expensive SMS and MMS software with 20% maintenance fees, it’s not the naughties anymore.

Oh! BTW they also have slick A2P ingestion with the latest identity / internet software, so you can drop all that silly Syniverse, TCR, etc. nonsense. One throat to choke with the latest internet-based protections. They’ve been doing messaging on the internet for decades, gmail. Just look at how much better the Android SPAM SMS experience is compared to the iPhone. They can help you deliver that experience to the iPhone customers using their Jibe Cloud.

CPaaS is dumba$$

This was a quick post, a knee-jerk reaction to the utter rubbish I see posted from analysts. But it achieved 10k impressions. Putting it on a par with the Bird posts from this week.

The author of the matrix also responded, which was great. I discovered the matrix on a Comviva post, so they’re the ones that made any changes not me.

In my discussion I think this part of the discussion highlight how contrived the CPaaS category has become.

The segment is programmable communications. CCaaS does customer experience management, why are those players not there? Also the conversational AI (Cognigy) space does that across multiple channels including voice and messaging. UCaaS also offers CCaaS and APIs, RingCentral is an example. CX Management platforms (Sprinklr), etc.

What you’ve shown is a segment of programmable comms where the customer does not want or already has or has but its legacy / expensive UCaaS or CCaaS, and is looking for a solution to fill a workflow gap. It’s a segment defined by the customer’s situation.

UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, are all built on the same technology, telecom app server, FreeSWITCH Sponsored by SignalWire is an example. CPaaS will remain a dumba$$ term as its marketing not technology, e.g. SMS aggregators trying to be more than an aggregator or companies pretending to be a mini-Twilio.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Daniel Soroko Donvito is now Contact Center Service Ops & Reliability Lead at BBVA IT España

Sergio López Arias is now Tech Pod Lead at INARI.IO. He was one of our first TADHack winners in 2014. Here is his hack, Famous4Money.

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