CXTech Week 29 2021 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 29 2021 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:

  • The coolest line-up of TADHack Global sponsors!
  • CCaaS Consolidation
  • And then there were none: Verizon is also switching to Android Messages as default for RCS
  • RESULTS: Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2021
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

The coolest line-up of TADHack Global sponsors!

We have a really cool line-up of sponsors for TADHack Global 2021 including: 

CCaaS Consolidation

Broadvoice has bought GoContact. João, the founder / CTO of GoContact and a TADSummit regular, will become the CTO for both companies which will continue to operate as separate brands.

Broadvoice provides enterprise communication services in North America, while GoContact is focused on CCaaS in Europe and LATAM. This enables the combined organization to cross sell and consolidate platforms under the technology leadership of João.

And in other news Zoom bought Five9 for $15B. The positioning is market expansion across UCaaS and CCaaS. We’ve seen a number of similar consolidation acquisitions over the past couple of years. Zoom had grown the UCaaS business organically, reaching 1 million users at the start of this year. But contact center is a different business.

The Talkdesk / Zoom partnership reported in CXTech Week 16 2021 is likely now void. UCaaS and CCaaS, and for that matter CPaaS, are applications on a telecom app server. The underlying technology is similar, and some of the integrations and workflows do overlap.

Today the buyers of phone systems and contact centers are generally different. Outside of the SMB market, the Contact Center folks try to keep their margins fat. I was once called a liar by a contact center analyst, when I described how Dzinga (UCaaS) had a very simple contact center feature for remote agents on its platform for $15 per month. It’s an industry that’s trying to hold back the tide of change.

And then there were none: Verizon is also switching to Android Messages as default for RCS

In CXTech Week 27 2021 we reported how AT&T and T-Mobile were using Google’s Messaging app for RCS. And now Verizon has also joined the party.

Google has been playing the long game on RCS. Trying to cooperate with carriers, giving up and doing it themselves, and then waiting for carriers to realize they can not do it themselves and join the Google bandwagon. Will Google take over carrier messaging? Probably across Android devices.

I thought Verizon would try to hold-out with Message+, I also pointed out in the limit users will choose their preferred messaging app on Android not Verizon. It’s nice to see common sense prevail, but I wonder how all the other features bundled with Message+ will be positioned. On the Google Play store it looks like July has been a rough month for the Message+ service.

RESULTS: Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2021

Everyone who completed the open source telecom survey will have received a copy of the results. If you did not, and I know there are a couple because of garbled email addresses in the survey, please contact me.

The survey follows on from the surveys run in 2020 and 2019, with the results presented here: 2020 and 2019. Thank you for your continued support.

Covered in the general survey this year are: Security, Serverless, STIR/SHAKEN, barriers and benefits of OSS, telcos and OSS, Training, IoT, and general geographic / category info. The project specific surveys follow the format of previous years with some customizations to make them more relevant to the specific projects.

We had 114 responses to general survey, +163 project survey responses (277 total). Our largest ever response.

At OPENSIPS SUMMIT DISTRIBUTED 2021 on 6-10 September I’ll be sharing a few of the interesting results on Tuesday 7th September. And also at TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021 in November.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to Thineth Athukoral for starting a new position as Software Engineer Intern at Pristine Solutions. Thineth won the TADHack Sri Lanka / IdeaMart Prize: RFID based transport ticketing by SKAT: Anjana Malindra Fredricks, Kasun Sudharaka, Chalithya Sangeeth, Thineth Athukorala. An RFID based transport ticketing system that used the IdeaMart APIs.

Jason Woodrow is now Consultant: Commercial Infrastructure Planning at MTN GlobalConnect.

Dirk Bartels is now Vice President at Bain & Company, after they bought his company. I’ve known Dirk since his time in Versant, over one decade ago.

James Patmore is now Vice President, Indirect Sales, EMEA at SheerID.

Raul Goycoolea Seoane is now Cloud, Artificial Intelligence & Data Director at Deloitte. I’ve known Raul sinc his time in Oracle over a decade ago.

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