CXTech Week 45 2021 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 45 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:

  • Congratulations to the Symbl.ai team!
  • Week 1 of TADSummit EMEA Americas
  • Subspace and Telnyx sponsor TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya Engage
  • Mitel now Resells RingCentral?
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to the Symbl.ai team!

Well done to the Symbl.ai team, a TADHack sponsor and TADSummit presenter, in rasing $17M. Symbl.ai, is a developer-first platform providing conversation intelligence (CI).

The funding round was led by Great Point Ventures, with additional participation from Gutbrain Ventures, PBJ Capital, Crosscut Ventures and Flying Fish Ventures. The new funding is just in a year from the company’s product launch and seed financing of $4.7M, will be used to accelerate product development of its end to end CI platform, expand the Symbl.ai team and meet the growing demand for their tech.

Week 1 of TADSummit EMEA Americas

We’ll be wrapping up the week at TADSummit with a presentation on ayoba: a case-study of an operator-led OTT initiative from Yusuf Kaka, Head of Technology, ayoba. Eero Tarjanne, Head of Business and Ecosystem Development, ayoba. But you’ll have to wait for tomorrow when we release that on.

This week kicked off with TADSummit EMEA Americas with a presentation on Is Mobile Identity still an opportunity for telcos? Jesus Cruz Manjavacas, VAS Development Expert at PLAY.

Followed by How to architect your WebRTC application, by Alberto González, CTO WebRTC.Ventures, & Arin Sime, CEO/Founder at WebRTC.ventures and AgilityFeat.

On Day 3 we had the ‘Alan thinks this is important’ keynote on Data isn’t just valuable, it’s going to save the planet! Miles Cheetham, Co-Chair Open Energy Steering Group.

And today, APIBAN: Protecting you from unwanted SIP traffic. Fred Posner, Senior VoIP Engineer, VoIP Consultant, LOD Communications

Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible:  AWA Network, Automat Berlin, STROLID, Radisys, GoContact, Broadvoice and Telnyx.

Subspace and Telnyx sponsor TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya Engage

We had so much fun in Orlando at the end of September with TADHack Global, we’re back on the 11-12th December for TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE. As always with TADHack, it’s a hybrid hackathon, so you can join us in-person or from the comfort of your own home.

AND two of TADHack Global’s sponsors will also be there as well: Subspace and Telnyx. We’re making sure the Subspace t-shirts arrive in time, Valencia College is now a global hotspot of Subspace t-shirts from TADHack Global 🙂

We have more than $15,000 in prizes and other goodies, great food, access to the Avaya ENGAGE Welcome Party at Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort Beach & Cabana Pool on Sunday (free food, drink and fun). Plus winners can present their hack to the 16,000 strong Avaya ENGAGE community on Monday 13th.

Register here. Let’s make TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE a success to help the Orlando economy get back to normal.

Mitel now Resells RingCentral

We covered in CXTech Week 33 2020, RingCentral adding ALE (Alcatel Lucent Enterprise) to its list of exclusive resale partners. Following on from Avaya and Atos Unify; and let’s not forget their long established carrier deals with AT&T, BT, Telus, etc. If you’re a large corporate, your future looks like it’s going to be RingCentral 😉

RingCentral also acquired certain Mitel technologies for $650 million.

  • RingCentral will become Mitel’s exclusive UCaaS partner, basically providing Mitel’s 35 million users with a path to cloud-based unified communications.
  • RingCentral acquired Mitel’s CloudLink technology — which provides a path from on-premises PBX technology to RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP) cloud platform.
  • On the flip side, Mitel’s investor group led by Searchlight Capital Partners, will invest $200 million in RingCentral.
  • Product enhancements leveraging joint technologies (beginning with Mitel phone and device support for RingCentral MVP) is planned for the first half of 2022.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Simon Ross is now Vice President of Sales at JMA Wireless. Simon’s been with Ericsson for some time, most recently as Director of Sales: 5G for Business.

Neil Stratford is now SaaS Architect at Speechmatics, improving speech recognition for accented English. He’s been a TADHack winner several times. Here’s a fun hack from 2015, WebRTC Lights.

Iyad Mallouh is now Senior Product Manager at COFE App. I’ve known Iyad since his time at Unifonic.

Avinash Mahto is now Tech Arch Delivery Associate Manager at Accenture. I’ve known Avinash since his time at Telestax.

Sam Machim updated his title on Linkedin profile to Community Product Manager at FlowForge. We covered his move there in CXTech Week 20 2021.

Peter Eropkin is now Director of Product Marketing, Fixed Voice and UC at Etisalat. Here’s his presentation on from TADSummit 2018 on Programmable Telecoms in MEA.

Geoff Hollingworth is now CMO Rakuten Symphony.

Varun Singh is now CPTO at Daily. Previously with 8X8 from their Callstats.io acquisition.

Alexandru Ciubuc is now Chief Executive Officer at Moldtelecom.

Arjun Kamath is now Technical Lead at Kaiku Health. He and his wife won at the first TADHack Global in 2014 with SuperStreamer.

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