The purpose of this CXTech Week 3 2020 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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TelcoSwitch acquires CPaaS provider Ziron
Alex Kinch is a regular TADSummit attendee. He founded Ziron in 2011. Ziron’s customers include virtual mobile operators (MVNOs), cloud-based communications platform providers, and fintech startups. Ziron began in the UK, and has expanded into Ireland, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Following the traditional expansion path of where Brits tend to take their holidays 😉
TelcoSwitch was founded in Nov 2015 in the UK, they provide unified turnkey open standards hosted telephony platform through resellers. TelcoSwitch’s UC offer includes software, hardware, support and advice, ensuring a complete telephony solution from start to finish. The team’s history comes from managed services.
TADHack-mini Orlando Chats It Up With Intelligent Agents
Returning for its fourth year, TADHack-mini Orlando will take place this year on March 28-29, the weekend before Enterprise Connect, and will be sponsored by Sangoma, Apidaze, Asterisk, and Simwood. Unlike past TADHACK-mini events, we’ve added a theme this year, “intelligent agents/assistants that use conversational interfaces,” and have the support of renowned conversational commerce expert Dan Miller, Opus Research, who will judge finalists on Sunday and support the event in its run-up.
This a particularly timely TADHack because hundreds of millions of people have grown comfortable carrying out their daily commerce using their own words through a conversational intelligent assistant. Whether they are called skills, actions, chatbots, or IVR scripts, they are the product of skills and creativity of citizen developers at banks, retailers, healthcare providers, government agencies, and others.
Communications is now democratized – anyone can program them. You can add programmable voice, calling, text messages (SMS and IM), audio and video messages, video calling, faxing, secure communications and authentication, decentralized communications, mobile payments, and much much more through easy-to-use APIs/SDKs, and even easier to use GUIs. The benefits go beyond IT too. Whenever developers get together to use all the tools, data and compute resources that solution providers offer, we collectively discover what’s possible and put it into practice, to improve not just customer care but ultimately quality of life.
TADHack is all about learning, sharing, coding (pro tip: GUIs help), creating, and most importantly, having fun with a diverse group of people. For Enterprise Connect attendees, you get hands-on experience with communication APIs, intelligent agents/assistants, unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact center as a service (CCaaS), unified communications and collaboration (UCC), and more.
And if that isn’t enough to entice you, we have lots of cash prizes, free entrance, and free food. Come join the fun at TADHack-mini Orlando.
Plus don’t forget we have TADHack-mini Phoenix coming up on the 1-2 Feb, just before Avaya ENGAGE 2020. There’s $15k in prize money available across a number of prize categories, winners get access to Avaya ENGAGE 2020 – Magic Johnson is one of the keynotes, and winners also get access to Avaya Welcome Party (featuring a Big Game) at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix – 10 minute walk away from the hackathon.
2600Hz Launches Next-Gen Call Center Solution Targeting Personalization of the Customer Experience
Following in the steps of Twilio FLEX, 2600Hz has build out a call center solution on its open source KAZOO platform, named Call Center Pro (CCPro).
CCPro allows SMBs to quickly modernize their call center capabilities and can be paired with KAZOO’s UCaaS/CPaaS APIs. CPro delivers dashboards, quality monitoring/management, skill based routing, eavesdrop/whisper/barge, etc.; as well as personalization through business intelligence to create a custom experience between the caller and your business.
CCPro includes:
- Optimized CX through a customizable platform with 300+ APIs and multiple integrations such as Zapier, Slack; and
- CCPro is fully integrated with KAZOO, so its geo-redundant, call centers using CCPro will always be up and running no matter what.
UC Summit starts 20th January, Virtual Conference and Expo.
I’ll be presenting on “Open Source Telecom Software is the Keystone of Our Industry”. I’m towards the end of the schedule. Its on my todo list for this week to get the video together, along with getting my hair cut, let’s see which happens first 😉
There’s an interesting discussion on LinkedIn on the threat of open source to telcos.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Pat Flynn has added a new role, International Technology Business Mentor at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Pat is a fount of knowledge in telecoms, always good to bound ideas off, check understanding, and shoot the breeze.
Paul Cardenal is now Sales Business Development Manager at Capgemini, he’s been a support of TADHack since its first event in 2014.
Congrats to Gabriel Cassim who has joined Geekulcha as an associate developer. Gabriel Cassim are one of the reasons TADHack Johannesburg is MASSIVE!
Raghu Prasad is now Vice President – Presales – Asia-Pacific and Japan at Workday.
When targeted advertising let’s you know you’re supposed to be having a mid-life crisis.
I keep getting Aston Martin adverts on LinkedIn, I must fall into the mid-life crisis segment. I have a Subaru Outback, and everyone who knows I have an Outback points me to the tweet shown below and giggles. FWIW I’m thinking about the Toyota Rav4 hybrid plugin next (available 2021, but I’ll likely wait to 2023), operates electric for all the shuttling of kids during the week, without range anxiety for weekend trips. Not many charging stations where we go hiking. This simple personal example is why predictions of autonomous electric cars dominating by 2030 simply ignores the buying habits and purchase cycles of the general public. Climate collapse depending..