The purpose of this CXTech Week 2 2023 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:

• Telcos and Programmable Communications Review
• Stacuity’s IoT Trends for 2023
• Tofane Global Acquires DIMOCO
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADSummit 2022: Telcos and Programmable Communications Review

I’ll cover in this review:

• Are we there yet? DT’s journey with CPaaS as a large Telecom’s grassroots project. Sebastian Schumann, International Network Infrastructure, Deutsche Telekom. Slides and Video.
• Should Telcos give up on CPaaS? Jesus Cruz Manjavacas, Development Technical Manager at PLAY | GCP Professional Cloud Architect (REMOTE). Slides, Video1 and Video2
• What Everyone Needs to Know about Protecting the CPaaS Ecosystem from Unlawful Robocalls. Gerry Christensen, VP YouMail. (REMOTE). Slides and Video.
• Supercharging CPaaS Growth & Margins with Identity and Authentication. Aditya Khurjekar, GM Prove Protocol. Slides and Video.
• Great Expectations: The life and times of 5G. Vish (Vishwamitra) Nandlall, VP Technology Strategy & Ecosystems, Dell Technologies. (REMOTE). Slides and Video
• “Don’t” ask your developer! Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO, hSenid Mobile Solutions (REMOTE). Slides and Video

If you’re a telco I recommend you watch the presentations of Sebastian and Jesus first. If you’re a programmable communications service provider (UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, Aggregator) I recommend starting with Gerry’s and Aditya’s presentations. They are all insightful and fun.

One point Sebastian highlights is ‘own evolution.’ Ringcentral exposes APIs from its programmable communications, which is labelled CPaaS, but its focus is not SMS or voice APIs though they are available. The focus is solutions for its customers either owned, or developed by a partners / customers. The silly marketing hype on API economies persists to this day in encouraging people to focus on API management than exposing services / application that matter to customers. I’ve said this for decades, it’s all about the services.

Stacuity’s IoT Trends for 2023

Stacuity, a TADSummit 2022 sponsor, is on a mission to help IoT MVNOs, Mobile Operators, Systems Integrators, IoT Solution Providers and IoT developers by empowering them to manage and secure IoT connectivity, with unparalleled flexibility and control.

Their predictions include:

• One in ten VC deals will be in IoT (reasonable)
• LPWAN and 5G (in-time) will accelerate IoT adoption (reasonable)
• The role of Edge computing in IoT will expand (depends how edge is defined, but there are some clear use cases wrt video and high throughput machine learning)
• Software-defined control capabilities will empower customers (reasonable)
• Digital Twins will bridge the gap with the virtual world (more niche in my opinion, see commentary below)
• IoT Security – building trust will be critical (this is true for the past several year)
• IoT regulation will increase (definitely 2023 needs to be the year regulators get their act together, but I doubt it, see commentary below)
• Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) remains a big prize. (more niche in my opinion, see commentary below)

Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) straddles Industrial IoT (equipment in the hospital) and the more mobile-side of IoT (consumerish devices out in the field). A nurse visiting a patient at their home / care home, taking a pH measurement of a wound can simply write down the pH in the visiting notes, or tether the device to the nurse’s phone by bluetooth, or a standalone WiFi device, or a fully mobile device. All are available on the market, use case and workflows for the practice define what works best. Today writing it down once a good measurement is made (dryness of the wound impacts the ability to get a good pH measurement, means it can take a few goes poking around in the wound – its a bit nasty) in the visiting notes is by far the most common.

Regulation / Security have significantly lagged the market need. We’ve seen some political concerns, and customers reacting by choosing point to point solutions with no cloud based middleware, as mentioned by Tim Panton in the Web3/WebRTC panel session at TADSummit 2022. The FCC seems more interested in taking part in pointless 6G panels and regulating wireless interfaces, than anything systems level.

Digital Twins have been overstated since its resurgence in popularity in 2016. The idea has been around for a couple of decades. And since 2016 it’s been linked to IoT, especially around new commercial buildings. However, wired controllers remain dominant for HVAC, even fire / smoke alarms are wired together because of regulatory requirements. Wireless has mostly entered in room entertainment / presentation controllers between a tablet (wireless) and TV / lights / control unit (which again is generally wired). Talk with any building manager and watch them roll their eyes when a wireless alternative to a wired system is discussed.

Tofane Global Acquires DIMOCO (A2P Messaging)

Tofane is a French investment company that has bought since its founding in 2017:

• iBasis (2019), which is the new home for DIMOCO. Note iBasis sold its messaging business to Messagebird in 2016. Some of the organizations advising iBasis I do not hold in high regard, such vacillation is not a surprise.
• SFR International Carrier Services (2018)
• Portugal Telecom International Carrier Services (2018)
• Altice Dominicana International Carrier Services, a subsidiary of Altice Europe N.V in the Dominican Republic (2018)
• NOS International Carrier Services in Portugal, expansion on the A2P SMS market (2020)
• Simfony, an IoT Platform-as-a-Service provider and Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE) – who has presented at TADSummit in 2017 and 2018. (2022)

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

After nearly 3.5 years writing for the comms and collaboration tech world, Ryan Daily is back reporting on the food and beverage industry as a senior correspondent with FoodNavigator-USA. 

Laura Marriott is now 5G Edge Cloud Business Development at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Daisuke Tsunoda is now Account Manager at Apple. We first met during his time at KDDI where we discussed RCS.

Lisa Abbott is now Head of Product Marketing at Cresta, real-time intelligence for contact centers. I’ve known Lisa since her time at Nominum.

David Collins is now Vice President of Sales at Dover Corporation, a diversified global manufacturer. I’ve known David for almost a decade, since his time at Intel working on API Management.

Matteo Tadjo Kotch is now Senior Product Marketing Manager at DocuSign, previously RingCentral.

Peter Griffiths is now Global Urban Futures Expert at BABLE Smart Cities. Peter presented at one of my events many years ago 🙂 BABLE is a community that provides high-quality information/services to drive the implementation of Smart City solutions.

Nick Craig Waller is now Marketing Director at UNLEASH, its the go-to place on HR and the future of work.

Anuradha Fernando is now Principal Architect – Reliability at Circles.Life. I’ve known Anuradha since his time at Intel.

Keith Sherry is now President at Nephilim Holdings. I’ve known Keith since his time as CEO of BT Conferencing, over 20 years ago.

Emmanuel Belleville is now Director Home Products Marketing & Content Partnerships at du. I’ve known Emmanuel since his time at Etisalat.

Jérôme Tassel is now Technology Consultant at Scenius. I’ve known Jérôme through his time at BT.

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