The purpose of this CXTech Week 36 2022 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:
- Avaya’s Layoffs
- Hey Sinch and Infobip! Where’s your Revenue? A2P SMS Market Size Worth $100B according to Insight Partners.
- Ooma Acquires OnSIP, Wait a Minute, Didn’t Intrado do That?
- Spotlights on TADHack Colombia and TADHack Sri Lanka
- Stacuity Sponsors TADSummit 2022
- TADSummit 2022 is 2 Months Away
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Avaya’s Layoffs
At the end of 2020 and again in 2021 I gave presentations and articles reviewing the programmable communications market through the pandemic. One point I highlighted is how the pandemic has forced many businesses to adopt XaaS / programmable communications as a bandaid to support WFH (Work From Home).
This did several things: companies realized XaaS or programable communications is reliable, significantly cheaper than their legacy platform(s), flexible (integrates with many of their IT services, supports a range of deployment architectures), and simply works.
Through 2021, the prolonged pandemic, many businesses realized WFH is here to stay, at least 3 days of the week. So rather than migrate back to their legacy platforms, they are migrating to programmable communications after a couple of years of successful operations.
This is the source of Avaya’s revenue shortfall, customers are moving away, it takes time to migrate and for that to hit legacy platform revenues. There are a few other issues, for example reselling RingCentral left customers on legacy Avaya platforms feeling abandoned. The term OneCloud applied to all products left customers feeling the portfolio was cloud-washed. While the pricing and business models were slow to catch up given all the usual legacy issues. Genesys, Five9, and many other CCaaS have been making hay at Avaya’s expense through the pandemic.
The revenue guidance gap is not a one-off issue, it’s a systematic trend, so another bankruptcy is likely given the massive debt burden.
Expect another bankruptcy, expect some aggressive M&A to move the technology base to be modern and low cost, expect a strong customer focus to help the existing base migrate with their customer data intact. All while fighting fires on bankruptcy, legal challenges (their lenders are not happy), channel challenges, and surgically removing the politicians while keeping the good workers; Avaya has some excellent people in my experience.
Layoffs are unfortunately always the easiest for US companies. A company’s greatest and surprisingly most expendable asset. In a recent announcement, Avaya said it will cut 2,500 jobs (12%) and take a restructuring charge of about $150 million in its fiscal fourth quarter ending Sept. 30. About $68 million of the charge will cover the costs of the 2,500 layoffs, while about $65 million will pay for consolidation of facilities and lease terminations. I was expecting a 20-25%, we’ll likely see more layoffs. How ‘surgical’ were the layoffs? We’ll have to see where the cuts were made. I’ve been hearten to date as some of the good people I know remain in post, but it’s too early to say.
Hey Sinch and Infobip, Where’s the Revenue? A2P SMS Market Size Worth $100B according to Insight Partners
It reminds me of the saying, ‘there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Most of these market reports are rehashed broken analysis. They make money from people buying the report because there’s a big market number, see $100B above.
The A2P SMS market is not this big, what they’ve done is double / triple counted A2P SMS revenues (CPaaS to aggregators to other aggregators to carriers), and bundled in all the business messaging services and related software for the market sizing.
An extreme example, imagine 10 players in a ring, each charging the player on the right $10B, until the circle is complete. That is not a $100B market. The core A2P SMS market did grow at 25-30% in 2021 and in Q1 2022, but it’s now softening from the recession and other factors.
Ooma Acquires OnSIP, Wait a Minute, Didn’t Intrado do That?
Looks like Intrado has been unloading some of its acquisitions. We covered BCM One acquiring the assets of Flowroute from Intrado in CXTech Week 11 2022. Now Intrado bought OnSIP in 2020, we covered in CXTech Week 32 2020. And now 2 years later Ooma has just bought OnSIP for $10M, approximately its annual revenue, with no mention of Intrado.
Spotlights on TADHack Colombia and TADHack Sri Lanka
Thank you to the amazing team at Yeapp! for making TADHack Colombia 2022 possible, especially Gabriel Rengifo and Daniela Granada. This is the 6th year of TADHack Popayán / Colombia. We’re proud of all they have achieved, it is truly world-class.
Its lovely to see the progress of the people involved in TADHack Colombia / Popayán:
- Congratulations to Maritza Mera Gaona on her Doctor of Telematics Engineering with a Laureate thesis in 2022. Maritza represented location sponsor Microsoft at TADHack Popayan 2020.
- In 2021 Camilo Segura became a React & NodeJS Junior Developer at IT Consultores S.A.S.. He is a TADHack winner (Popayán) from 2018 with Dnuncia by RM5 using Status, an excellent hack.
- In 2020 ANDRES MACA became a Software Engineer at VeriTran, a TADHack Popayán winner with Dnuncia by RM5.
TADHack Popayán / Colombia is now in its 6th year. You can see all the hacks from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 in these playlists, and some of the photos in the picture below. Colombia has produced global winners every year, with impressive hacks that received special commendation from the global sponsors. TADHack Colombia / Popayán is a great example of how high tech skills and innovative talent are everywhere, not just in the Bay Area.
Please register for TADHack Colombia 2022 here.
Thank you to the world-class team at hSenid Mobile for making TADHack Sri Lanka 2022 powered by ideamart possible. Sri Lanka is an “original cast member”, there at the launch of TADHack in 2014. Every year Sri Lanka demonstrates its impressive talent to the world, by mashing up the ideamart APIs with the global sponsors.
It’s lovely to see the progress of the people involved in TADHack Sri Lanka and the expansion of the event:
- We’ve tracked the progress of Ruwan and Extrogene, who created Offer Hut in 2014. See the video at the end of this weblog.
- In 2016 team Siplo (including Wickramaranga Abeygunawardhana) created an online tutoring platform. He went on to found Meetrix.io, a Jitsi development company.
- In 2021 for the first time in Sri Lanka, parallel to the main event, was TADHack Teens Sri Lanka 2021, which was dedicated to school age teenagers from around the island.
- hSenid Mobile not only runs TADHack Sri Lanka, they also run TADHack Bangladesh. You can see some of the logos from those events below.
- And in my opinion TADHack Sri Lanka also does the best entertainment of any hackathon.
Please register for TADHack Sri Lanka 2022.
Stacuity Sponsors TADSummit 2022
We have a new TADSummit sponsor, Stacuity. Here is the outline of their keynote presentation:
Time to ditch the ‘dumb-pipe’ – reinventing the core mobile network, to put developers first.
Mike Bromwich, CEO / Co-Founder Stacuity & Tim Dowling, Co-Founder Stacuity
- The emergence of public cloud has revolutionized the way developers can muster and deploy virtual infrastructures, as and when required.
- In contrast, mobile networks are still rigidly defined and protected by operators, who are unable or unwilling to offer such control and flexibility.
- As a result, the mobile network operates as little more than a dumb-pipe (unless you have lots of patience and deep pockets).
- Addressing this problem requires a different approach, not just the creation of a thin façade over legacy network elements.
- How Stacuity is reinventing the core mobile network, to put developers first.
TADSummit 2022 is 2 Months Away
Firstly, thank you to STROLID, Radisys, Broadvoice / GoContact, AWA Network / Automat Berlin, and Stacuity for sponsoring TADSummit 2022. Their support is critical for this event to take place.
Secondly, thank you to all the presenters and panelists from around the world.
The best experience is in-person:
- Aveiro is beautiful, you must visit it at least once in your life.
- Nothing beats face-to-face networking. The event set-up, relaxed format, lunch and dinner will provide lots of opportunities to chat with the in-person attendees.
- Dinner is sponsored by GoContact at their offices to provide the best of Aveiro cuisine. With beer, wine, and a roof deck – meet more people and enjoy Aveiro’s ambiance.
- Jam-packed agenda you can dip-in and dip-out of, with lots of areas to work and take calls. You may be away from the office, but you’ll still be able to multi-task throughout the event.
- The DDoS Workshop will not be live streamed at the request of several participants. In-person will be the only way to learn and share your DDoS experiences.
TADSummit is the thought-leadership event in programmable communications for ten years. Here is the agenda, we have 5 presentations where we need to add content, it’s almost complete.
The physical event will be held at GoContact’s offices in Rua das Cardadeiras Lugar, nº107, 3800-125 Aveiro, Portugal. Aveiro is referred to as the Venice of Portugal. And as always we’ll live stream for everyone online. Here are the logistics and how to book your ticket both in-person and online.
TADSummit remains the only place to get a no-BS (it’s in our policies) understanding of what’s working across technology, services, go to market; and on the future of programmable communications.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Igor Pavlov is immediately available for JavaScript/NodeJS software engineering contracts. Please share if you know anyone that might benefit. He’s one of the best developers who have taken part in TADHack, and we’ve seen many!
Sami Mäkeläinen has set up his own consulting business, Transition Level, focused on exploring the many cross-disciplinary lessons the aviation sector can teach other industries and society about operating tightly coupled and complex systems safely.
For those who listened to his TADSummit Asia 2021 keynote, Mindful Connections, this is not a surprise. Sami set out an excellent review of the systemic failures being created given the increasing coupling and interactions of communication systems. I highly recommend reviewing the AI Incident Database (AIID), it makes for interesting reading given Sami’s keynote.
Torrey Searle is now Software Architect at Openline (YC S22). Openline sses a company’s data to personalize the support experience and automate issue resolution. Torrey is a TADHack winner from 2015 where he demonstrated the Integration of Midori into a Cisco Spark room with many impressive capabilities and won the Cisco prize. Here’s the link to his remote submission, parental discretion is advised.
Cagdas Yelen is now Staff Software Engineer at Google. In 2015 he ran TADHack Istanbul while working for Intel.
Charlotte Dunsterville is now Founder at Customerise.
Mikhail (Misha) Nekorystnov is now SVP of Engineering at Stealth Startup.
Yeasin Ar Rahman is now Chief Technology Officer at WellDev.
Raul Iglesias is now ExO Consultant | Technology & Strategy consulting at OpenExO
Danny Stefanic is now CEO at Hyperspace Metaverse Platform
Juhana Enqvist is now Director of Product Management at Kempower.
Shanaka Wicky is now Lead – Techno Marketing & Digital Adoption at Dialog Axiata PLC
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