The purpose of this CXTech Week 24 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:

• Enough navel-gazing – telcos need to focus on their customers’ needs <sigh>
• Remember the Brexit marketing of ‘Get Brexit done!” Well Network APIs have adopted it, “Get Network APIs done!”
• Podcast 73: Truth in AI, Strolid, Papa in a Box
• Podcast 74: TADSummit Innovators, Programmable Communications in the Automotive Industry.
• Microsoft to quit Affirmed and Metaswitch in telecom retreat
• VOX SOLUTIONS on Twitter’s $60 Million Scam.
• Jambonz newsletter: June 2024 – a new corporate entity
• Apple showed P2P RCS only
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Enough navel-gazing – telcos need to focus on their customers’ needs

Telecom TV reviews a session at the DSP Leaders World Forum. The problems begin with the term DSP (Digital Service Provider). It’s a nonsense term used by the telecom establishment. DSP is never used by customers who rather call them telco, or telecom service providers, or ISP (Internet Service Provider).

In the article its stated “network transformation strategies and the cultural shift from communication service provider (CSP) to digital service provider (DSP) is well under way.” That’s BS, customers are still subscribing to a bundle of voice (including emergency), SMS/MMS, and internet access. And possibly payTV if its a fixed network operator. Nothing has changed in over one decade. The only way it could be true is if the cultural shift is to ignoring reality.

Telcos are network operators, collectively they’ve spent hundreds of billions gilded the 5G lily as 4G is good enough. This is a statement of fact, they’ve invested in their network not in digital services, whatever that term may mean.

I use Mint mobile, the best telco I’ve ever had as everything just works, I never need to contact them. At the start of June I received a message that the family’s plan would renew and there was nothing I need do.

I was recently forced to get a new phone, so experienced the underwhelming speed of 5G, 400 Mbit/s versus 200 Mbit/s at 4G (Mint is an MVNO so the speed is likely capped). My phone also has a setting called ‘Smart 5G’ that automatically switches between 5G and 4G to reduce battery consumption. I only see the wireless connection strength, not whether its 4G or 5G. Even the device manufacturers understand the reality of 5G, it simply does not matter to the customer. DSPs, stop ignoring reality!

I shared earlier this year the move of telcos away from enterprise voice. What was once the core service (voice), is becoming a resale, and often it’s not even ‘badged’ because the technology provider has a strong global brand, maybe initially co-branded. It’s a business decision, voice is over IP not a dedicated network, so commoditized from a number of vendors. And the offer is much more IT / workflow centric.

I could go on at length about the changes happening in the industry that the DSP Leaders are ignoring. The reality is telcos operate a network that gives them an oligopoly. There are some legacy services that need much more attention, i.e. voice calling and SMS, robocalling and spam are not acceptable.

Drop the DSP term, there are no DSP Leaders as there are no digital services, focus on reality in particular two things: network operations and making legacy services (voice calling and SMS/MMS) much better. Enterprise services are a separate topic.

Remember the Brexit marketing of ‘Get Brexit done!” Well Network APIs have adopted it, “Get Network APIs done!”

Its funny that Brexit marketing is being copied by the telecom establishment (DSP Leaders) in trying to force action on Network APIs.

In the article, the awful McKinsey report is qualified.

“There have been eyebrows raised at a report from consultancy McKinsey, which claimed $300bn can be generated in new revenues from telco network API exposure. 

But that figure isn’t quite what it seems: In its report (commissioned by the GSMA) on the sector, what McKinsey stated was: “Over the next five to seven years, we estimate the network API market could unlock around $100bn to $300bn in connectivity- and edge-computing-related revenue for operators while generating an additional $10bn to $30bn from APIs themselves,” so that $300bn number relates to the high end of direct and associated revenues. The report added: “But telcos won’t be the only ones vying for this lucrative pool. In fact, with the market structure currently in place, they would cede as much as two-thirds of the value creation to other players in the ecosystem, such as cloud providers and API aggregators – repeating the industry’s frustrating experience of the past two decades,” it added.    

That up to $30bn is still quite a big number, of course, even over years and spread across the industry, and that figure might be a bit optimistic, noted Peter Arbitter, SVP of portfolio and product management at Deutsche Telekom. He says the German operator believes the potential value to telcos over that time period is likely to be in the region of $8bn to 10bn.”

Telecom TV

There’s a sleight of hand taking place, the existing programmable telecoms industry provide many of the services covered by Camara. If it’s only $8-10B, that’s smaller that the existing identity authentication services using telecom networks, phone ID, 2FA, SIM swap, etc.

The establishment is trying to force through a broken Network API strategy, re-imagining OneAPI.

A point I want to highlight is DT’s win of Twilio customer VirtualQ has nothing to do with Camara and Network APIs, and everything to do with learning from the existing programmable communications industry.

Carriers in North America are feeling another European-led, drawn-out farce like OneAPI, RCS, Joyn, WAC, IMS, ViLTE, Mobile Connect, etc. There is no appetite for yet another standards-hugging fishing trip.

US carriers want deals, cash, and programmable telecoms credibility their enterprise customers will recognize. In particular winning large enterprise accounts from Twilio, like VirtualQ.

Verizon and AT&T both have extensive and relevant mobile and cable network QoS experience, so know the challenges with the current QoS API story.

The anti-GSMA/EU feeling on web related standards appears to be growing at the exec level. According to insiders, Ericsson has so many fires to fight that Camara is in the noise. Nokia in the US has few available staff to support Camara after all the layoffs.

That is why the establishment (DSP Leaders) have resorted to the desperate Brexit marketing of “get it done!” It’s already done, there’s an industry called programmable telecoms (NaaS falls in that as well) the DSP Leaders are yet again ignoring market reality. Shame on the telecom establishment.

Podcast 73: Truth in AI, Strolid, Papa in a Box

1) Breaking news: Ken Herron is now the CMO of Strolid, Inc. https://lnkd.in/eBndUrdG
2) I’m really proud Ken has joined the Strolid tribe. They’re going to redefine automotive BDC (Business Development Center) beyond what has already been achieved, and will take their leadership into other verticals. Strolid is one to watch.
3) Vin Micciche reviews the history of Strolid, Inc., The dominant factor throughout Vinnie’s experience in automotive retail is the critical importance of data to successful BDC.
4) With Thomas McCarthy-Howe‘ prescient insight in creating vCons, Strolid is able to bring the latest AI / LLM innovations to help dealers better gather leads, retain existing customers, communicate with lost customers, and ultimately sell more to more customers by delivering the best dealer experience in their region.

We start with news that Ken Heron is now the CMO of Strolid. Ken has been part of TADSummit for many years, sharing innovations in chatbots, conversation intelligence, and AI. Similarly, Strolid has sponsored TADHack and TADSummit over the years. I’m really proud Ken has joined the Strolid tribe. They’re going to redefine automotive BDC (Business Development Center) beyond what has already been achieved, and will take their leadership into other verticals. Strolid is one to watch.

Vinnie Micciche, founder and CEO of Strolid, provides an excellent introduction. His career spans over thirty years in automotive retail. Against his dad’s advice Vinnie joined the industry and has worked through several technology revolutions including the rise of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the internet as a channel including eCommerce across the whole customer lifecycle. From leads (inbound), though sales, service, and outbound (marketing).

The dominant factor throughout that experience is the critical importance of data. It enables BDC to be measured, hence improved, and demonstrates the contribution of BDC to dealers’ KPI (Key Performance Index).

Customer communication has become richer, it’s not just a telephone call, its internet leads, chat bots, email conversations, SMS chats, etc. Also voice communications as become data, recorded and made text with additional processing such as sentiment analysis.

Vinnie has worked with Thomas Howe over many years, after Thomas sold his last company he joined Vinnie to build out the vision of measuring and improving BDC performance. Underlying this vision is the concept of ‘papa in a box’. Vinnie’s dad is part of Strolid and brings vast experience in automotive sales. At some point he will retire, Strolid must to retain that unique font of knowledge and experience. Corporations in France are currently facing a 30k year knowledge deficit as baby boomers are now retiring. This is a real and present problem for all businesses across the world.

Using vCon, not only are customer conversations retained in compliance with personal data regulations, all papa’s conversations on what his experience tells him about those conversations can be also be retained. This enables the creation of ‘papa in a box’ the automation of listening with 50+ years of automotive retail experience. We are living in a unique time, though AI/LLMs (Large Language Models) in its current form is new, it can be applied directly to many existing businesses today.

Ken has created, sold, and launched award-winning conversational and generative AI use cases for customers and resellers globally. Ken will help Strolid, Inc. and resellers’ enterprise and government customers to connect with their customers and citizens. Strolid’s vCons technology manages the data for AI by securing and organizing conversational data to feed AI. Helping companies across all industry verticals, from automotive to retail and more, listen to people at scale securely and compliantly allows them to understand their customers and business to increase sales and delight stakeholders.

Ken then reviewed a number of use cases. Sentiment analysis is part of the platform. Questions can be asked about, what customers are unhappy, and a list of customers can be produced without having to listen to all the conversations. The ‘save a deal’ app delivers the top targets to call that morning. Ken gave an example in health care, feeding patient conversations into the platform, and asking a simple question of, ‘why are patient’s cancelling appointments.’ This simple question remains a challenge for most healthcare providers.

The dominant factor throughout Vinnie’s experience in automotive retail is the critical importance of data to successful BDC. With Thomas’ prescient insight in creating vCons, Strolid is able to bring the latest AI / LLM innovations to help dealer better gather leads, retain existing customers, communicate with lost customers, and ultimately sell more to more customers by delivering the best dealer experience in their region.

Podcast 74: TADSummit Innovators, Programmable Communications in the Automotive Industry.

This week has been STROLID week. We kicked off with Podcast 73: Truth in AI, Strolid, Inc., Papa in a Box, an authentic discussion on the role of AI and vCon in automotive sales; and we finished with Podcast 74: Programmable Communications in the Automotive Industry (this weblog), were again vCon plays an important role.

The link between programmable telecoms and the production line is strong, a couple of recent podcasts include:

• Podcast 68: TADSummit Innovators, Matthew Smith, Industry4.0, we discussed how conversations are critical parts on Industry4.0. Yet we’re not communicating that to the manufacturing industry, hence we’ll have an Industry4.0 theme at TADSummit.
• Podcast 57: TADSummit Innovators, Vladimir Beloborodov, Panasonic Automotive, we discussed  Amazon Alexa and Panasonic Automative on “Multiple Voice Assistant Dialogs and Arbitration” part of the Voice Interoperability Initiative Architecture Series Whitepapers.  And the Open Voice Interoperability (here’s the github) initiative letting multiple GenAI-based agents potentially, accessible over a speech-based UI (User interface) interop.

In Podcast 74 we have John Musser, Senior Director of Engineering, Ford Pro at Ford Motor Company. John and Thomas go back to the early days of Programmable Web, over 17 years ago. Which began as a list of available Web APIs.

It was 25 years ago Thomas attended a hackathon at MIT, there he saw the future of programmable telecoms. Things happening in minutes that would take months in traditional development. That started his journey in programmable communications, which has led to vCon.

There’s a great discussion on the work Programmable Web did with developers, organizations like the World Bank, and being the backbone for many analyst predictions about APIs. But enough of reminiscing.

Every vehicle that leaves Ford’s production line includes a wireless modem, customer feedback can be gather not just over the web and call center, feedback in the car can be recorded. Voice agents are critically important to avoid distracted driving, people are getting accustomed to using them. John shared how multiple agents can be used, this overlaps the discussions we had with Vladimir Beloborodov in Podcast 57.

The discussion moves onto all the workflows around maintaining uptime; including fleet management, service, parts, telematics, etc. The car, and the person driving it deliver many insights than need to be ingested. vCon enable the human part of that captured and combined will all the machine data. It was a fun discussion around how vCon can play a role in Ford Pro. That wrapped up TADSummit’s STROLID week.

Microsoft to quit Affirmed and Metaswitch in telecom retreat

From what I understand, most of the Metaswitch team has been cast to the 4 winds within Microsoft. Likely they’ll look to offload the contracts, I’m not sure the platform is worth continued development given how the market is changing.

Enterprise Voice is not a priority for carriers, its commoditized. See comments from Telstra https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alanquayle_telstra-to-axe-2800-jobs-almost-10-of-activity-7198743150717267968–h10.

Carriers are more likely to partner, e.g. RingCentral, than build their own. Their struggles in attempting to use open source to build their own platform highlights the wishful thinking of Techco transformation.

Fixed is about broadband. Voice is no longer a network service, rather an IP service. There are emergency fixed voice services, but here with Verizon FiOS when the power goes out the home generator comes on and mobile voice remains. So fixed emergency voice is generally not mentioned. I know other markets are different, but mobile emergency voice has generally replaced fixed emergency voice.

With Affirmed, we all know the challenges on 5G carrier spend.

We’re witnessing the shift away from fixed voice as a network service.

VOX SOLUTIONS on Twitter’s $60 Million Scam.

Its been funny seeing the industry’s reaction to VOX Solutions’ post. The lack of honesty and openness in the industry means anyone who shares the reality of what is happen will draw attention. Maybe more should be sharing the reality of what is happen. As Daniel Gill pointed out, with his technology A2P SMS can finally have certifications in the SMS supply chain

Good post from VOX SOLUTIONS on Twitter’s $60 Million Scam.
There’s $100Bs being scammed from web brands using AIT SMS. Hence the push to alternative technologies like passkeys and even good old email.

https://voxsolutions.co/twitters-60-million-scam-unveiling-the-rising-trend/

Daniel Gill from Augnet shared how this scam works and how it can be stopped. AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) is being used to destroy the routing tables enterprises (e.g. Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter) use for SMS; and because data in SMS is sent in the clear its about to become a massive source for fraud including account take over (ATO). https://blog.tadsummit.com/2024/01/17/dan-gill-augnet/

There are also processes that can help reduce the opportunity for fraud. Uku Tomikas highlighted if the SMS rates were openly published, the industry can focus on value add. https://blog.tadsummit.com/2024/03/19/uku-tomikas/. Such a open, honest, and simple step.

Robert Vis showed how focusing on the service and bringing the price of SMS close to cost can also shift the business to be customer focused. https://blog.tadsummit.com/2024/02/02/robert-vis/

We had an interesting discussion on whether telcos are culpable in the HORISEN podcast, https://blog.tadsummit.com/2024/06/04/fabrizio-salanitri/. Fabrizio Salanitri showed how telcos can take back control of the SMS experience for their customers.

None of this is rocket science, the industry needs to be open and customer focused. The current phrase is “restoring trust.” Unfortunately, the companies that created the current situation are unlikely to be trusted again.

Trust can only begin through sharing how this circumstance came about and how it can be stopped. Talking shops with ‘codes of conduct’ will not engender trust. Action is required through the adoption of technologies such as Augnet and HORISEN, coupled with published SMS pricing. We’ll be discussing this and more at TADSummit, https://alanquayle.com/2024/05/tadsummit-tadhack-global-2024/. The event where leaders with conscience have the open conversations lacking elsewhere.

Jambonz newsletter: June 2024 – a new corporate entity

As programmers, we love to refactor our code in order to simplify and improve it, to proactively avoid technical debt, and generally to build things that stand the test of time.  Well, guess what?  Sometimes it’s necessary to refactor the organization for the same reason.

To best position jambonz for future growth, we’ve created a new corporate entity: FirstFive8 Inc.  FirstFive8 will provide commercial services for customers of jambonz and drachtio, as well as developing commercial products that leverage these open source assets.

What changes will you notice?  Probably not much in the short term.  We are not changing our existing pricing or licensing models.  If you have a support contract with us, then when it comes up for renewal the entity on the agreement will change, but the same team that you are used to (plus hopefully some new faces) will be taking care of you.  And if you are spending a lot of time heads down in the code you will see the copyright notice change as the jambonz and drachtio software copyrights are assigned to FirstFive8.  Longer-term, we hope you will see more exciting new products and features, as well as ever-increasing quality of our support and service offerings.

Why make such a change?  A C corp structure offers advantages when it comes to growing a company, mainly around hiring employees and raising money.  We currently have no need and no plans to do any fundraising, but we want the flexibility to do so in the future should we see opportunities to create unique value that we want to exploit and that would require outside investment. Today we are comfortably able to self-fund all of our planned development initiatives and we are proud of that.

And finally….where did the name FirstFive8 come from?  Any guesses?  First one to ping me with a correct answer in the #jambonz-community channel on our Slack wins a prize!

Jambonz Newsletter June 2024

Apple showed P2P RCS only

Great post from Stuart Mitchell on how the RCS industry got a little over excited on Apple’s announcement.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Darryl Weaver is now Senior Platform Engineer at Wise. We first met in 2014, at TADHack Global, he worked for Canonical, at TADHack sponsor and helped with the demo IMS in Minutes.

Alex Salamon is now Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at AirWiress.io. I’ve known Alex for nearly 20 years, since his time at Sigma Systems. When I was on their advisory board.

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